STAFF/VOLUNTEER READER SHOWCASE
BY SUSANNAH W. SIMPSON
Copyright is held by the author.
The woman is dying in the front room. The dog
sleeps at her feet. The man paces from his shelf-lined
study to the front room where southwestern light
streams across his wife’s bed, across the sleeping dog
and warms Saltillo tiles. The man paces between his books
and his dying wife. The nurse encourages him
to say to his wife “It is OK to go. I will be fine here.”
Instead, he sits at her bedside in the front room
and recounts versions of Shakespeare —
There was a Prince of Denmark . . . In Verona, two star-crossed lovers . . .
Shipwreck; revenge, father and daughter . . . A King is insane.
Three witches stir a brew. A shrew is tamed.
Folly in a dark Midsummer’s wood. Mercy and a pound of flesh . . .
The wife murmurs, sometimes her eyelids flicker.
He hopes she hears him. He tells his wife of profound
tenderness that lives on the pages of Rumi, Hafiz, and Sappho.
The nurse assures him “Hearing is the last sense to go”
but the man wonders How could we know?
How do we know?
Still, he tells his wife a tale of imprisonment, of injustice
at the Chateau D’IF, philosophy of the Little Prince,
and how deep sadness lives in Tolstoy’s Anna.
The dog follows the man as he moves from bookshelves
to his wife’s bedside in the front room.
The dog watches as the man then places
each book in packing crates labelled “Donations.”
The dog whimpers, but the man tells the dog of heroism
and risk, of jousting windmills and magical swords in stone.
When the last book is packed, all the shelves emptied
the man takes a rope to the back shed,
locking the shed door from inside.
His wife, barely breathing, murmurs.
Her eyelids flicker and the dog sleeps
on sun-warmed tiles in the front room.
***
Volunteer submission reader, Susannah W. Simpson is a hospice nurse and an ESL tutor. Her poetry has been published in North American Review, Potomac, Wisconsin Review, South Carolina Review, POET, Nimrod International, Poet Lore, Salamander, Sequestrum,and Xavier Review among others. Her book: Geography of Love & Exile was published in December 2016 by Cervena Barva Press (Somerset, MA). She is the founder and co-director of Performance Poets of the Palm Beaches Monthly Reading Series. Pine Row Press has accepted her poetry collection Mother Wind for publication in late fall/winter 2024. And Shanti Arts Press will publish her poetry collection Dharma of Death and Desire in 2025. She is based in Florida.