Shuffling Out Toward Morning

After an hour in the infusion lab,
Taxol dripping into her,
fighting her cancer;

after sitting nauseous
next to a man
vomiting into a Pepsi cup,

she rose, palming the wall,
stooping only to pick up
a pen a doctor had dropped,

giving it back to the doctor
who had slipped it poorly
into his coat.

Copyright Credit: Poem copyright ©2013 by Don Welch, whose most recent book of poems is Gnomes, (Stephen F. Austin Univ. Press, 2013). Poem reprinted by permission of Don Welch.