Sick Day

The blanket to her chin,
eyes cast down and brown like a muddy river
tied-slow long ways to bend;
“I’m dying, daddy.”
Five years old and feeling it,
the burden of a vermin invasion,
a half-denarian german way station,
lying dying sickness forty pounds upon her fluffy mattress,

but not really:
a little girl with a touch of the flu;
“I’m dying, daddy.”

Tonight,
seperately,
the water glaze eyes of a grandfather

on the wrong end of a diagnosis,
his granddaughter’s.
A sexagenarian and a functioning illiterate,
he has to look up the word “lymphoma” on the In’ernet
and try to understand:
his daughter al’dy gone, and now, maybe
her daughter also too?

She looks down at her sheets,

her eyes too pained to rise:
“I’m dying, daddy.”

Forty-eight hours later she’s bouncing on my couch in a yellow
rainbow-dotted nightgown,

challenging me to a fistfight.
She swings at me as hard as she can laugh.

In my browser history: “lymphoma.”