Popular Science

She drops the big white bullet palm to palm
to palm like stepping down on swinging stairs
to the top of Big Rock Candy Mountain,
where the good cells sing in the cigarette
trees and there's always ice and whiskey too.
Her mouth's blistered from chemo and she's full

of holes as she goes where hydrocodone
grows in the acetaminophen shoals.
She laughs when I write our hearts make morphine.
She writes you're three hours away happy in a book,

floating in a tub.

Copyright © 2008 Steve Davenport All rights reserved
from The Literary Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission