The Bones of the Hospital (Le ossa dell’ ospedale)

We’re making a novena for grandpa.

I stumble on words like leukemia,

Don’t understand bone marrow transplanting.

Before my father goes to donate his,

We’re having bone soup.  "It’s nutritious food,"

Explains my mother.  But the real reason’s

Because we’re broke, my classmates like to taunt.

I wonder if physicians will respect

Grandpa if neighbors hate poor foreigners

Like us, whose kitchen windows don’t emit

Aromas of expensive T-bone steaks.

Dad’s rich in health, the closest match.  He sighs,

"Vado in ospedale!"  Miracles

Depend on faith but don’t discriminate.

One time in Stromboli, a ledge gave way —

Eruptions tearing up the crust beneath

His feet —  and nonno reached out for tree bones,

Dangled all night till rescuers arrived.

Volcanoes are impartial.  Which divine

Did grandpa put in charge of destiny?

Disease erupts like blowholes. Lava’s kind

To crops —  then turns destructive hot-spot god.

Perhaps le ossa dell’ ospedale

Are saints that guard red wards of surgery,

Restore the safe ground under human feet.

Strong bones of hospitals exist in dreams,

Protecting patients, blocking the cold room

Where promise goes, supplying nourishment.

Dad visits gramps. Hope's fire is revived.

Marrow's like monks who chant for his to rise.

Native New Yorker and award-winner, LindaAnn LoSchiavo is a member of British Fantasy Society, HWA, SFPA, and The Dramatists Guild. Titles published in 2024:  “Always Haunted: Hallowe’en Poems” [Wild Ink], “Apprenticed to the Night” [UniVerse Press], and “Felones de Se: Poems about Suicide” [Ukiyoto].

Forthcoming: “Cancer Courts My Mother” [Prolific Pulse Press, 2025].

Book  Accolades earned: Elgin Award for “A Route Obscure and Lonely” and Chrysalis BREW Project’s Award for Excellence for “Always Haunted: Hallowe’en Poems.”

BlueSky:   @ghostlyverse.bsky.social - - -X: @Mae_Westside

Oncology-Whiz

It felt like that morning took all day long,

the ambergris hours you spent in bottom time in the MRI,

the doctors going wreck diving inside your head, your body,

and the waiting room smelled of lumps in the throat 

and targeted therapy, talcum powder and protein bars,

they didn’t let me in the room to watch the procedure;

I took a second look at life’s orchestral score 

to see what I was supposed to be doing with all that concern

and the only notation was fermata, fermata right now

meaning stay, meaning do not move, meaning do not breathe

and while the doctors brandished their dive lights

to see what new world was in the dark inside you

I asked a nurse in the hallway to remind me where the cafeteria was

and I paid for a bagel with cream cheese and orange juice

and I left my change in the take-some, leave-some cup

and I let out a long breath in an atmosphere of new age Muzak,

butter and burnt rubber, I lay adrift among the plastic trays

pondering superluminal visitations of regret and fear,

far from home in theodicy, understanding anew the truth 

that the mass tone of nightmare is worry

and I wondered if you were awake in that machine upstairs

or if you actually got some sleep in there, dreaming in raw kiloyears,

hearing roars of bears, talking with that one shade of blue,

listening to the whispers of an immortal clad in tints of gold and pink,

surfacing only briefly to heed the pronouncements

of cicadas, buzz of determinist bees,

a crash of China cymbals near sentient medical dashboards

acuminates into hoarse pledges of love,

accelerando on the fellfields of prognosis

then came weeping and ambulatory wishes from me to the clouds 

and the doctor said the sight of me in the chapel on my knees 

turned out to be benign, she’s coming around,

the creator speaks in doppler ultrasound:

do you see that I am trying to live,

live in some kind of way by which you can tell

I paid attention to all your bravery.

Rich Boucher resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rich’s poems have appeared in The Nervous Breakdown, Eighteen Seventy, Menacing Hedge, The Rye Whiskey Review and Cultural Weekly, among others, and he has work forthcoming in Pulp Literary Magazine and Eunoia Review. Rich recently served as Associate Editor for the online literary magazine BOMBFIRE. He is the author of All Of This Candy Belongs To Me, a collection of poems published by Jules’ Poetry Playhouse Publications. Peep richboucher.bandcamp.com for more. He loves his life with his love Leann in the perpetually intriguing Southwest.

The Grape-Nuts of Wrath

From the bed to the window

takes me a good, quiet minute,

from the window to the toilet

takes me a minute or two, everybody shush,

from the toilet to the closet

takes my breath away for a spell,

from the closet back to bed

takes my eloquence très rapide:

no situation is permanent, you said,

each day a different horse on the carousel,

each breakfast something small in a bowl.

I will choose to be as grateful as I can

for having survived the crash;

what’s the purpose in hurling the warm sweet milk 

against a wall that can’t even defend itself?

They say that the Saturday after next 

something special’s in the works for dessert. 

When I poke my straw 

into the lid of my ice water cup

it makes a sound like some kind of 

sing-song gasp of weak praise,

and I raise my hand up to say amen. 

Rich Boucher resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rich’s poems have appeared in The Nervous Breakdown, Eighteen Seventy, Menacing Hedge, The Rye Whiskey Review and Cultural Weekly, among others, and he has work forthcoming in Pulp Literary Magazine and Eunoia Review. Rich recently served as Associate Editor for the online literary magazine BOMBFIRE. He is the author of All Of This Candy Belongs To Me, a collection of poems published by Jules’ Poetry Playhouse Publications. Peep richboucher.bandcamp.com for more. He loves his life with his love Leann in the perpetually intriguing Southwest.