more to give

on good days air would leave her lungs accompanied by a name of someone we didn’t know or a place she never visited other days she didn’t say much at all or asked if we went to prom together all those years ago and sometimes we’d tell her we did because we missed the creases in her cheeks that were mostly bone now and a ferris wheel of thinning veins but within the carrion of indeterminable flesh and tapioca and hospital garments and mistaken memories or abandoned dreams there was still bounty to harvest still things to take and so she knitted under the weight of eager eyes and stench of unhealing wounds and we hoped that this one would mean something different or save us from her fate and so we sank into yellowing tiles with our anchor or empty adoration and called her our savior in a crucifix memorial celebrating daytime television