SARAH ITO - POEMS

Sarah Ito is a published novelist, essayist, poet and actor. An army veteran, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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​HORIZONTAL IN A VERTICAL WORLD

Friday night,
Just got paid, three hundred dollars.
Next to the bodega, a storefront, 
Windows plastered with shabby banners...
"Funds Wired to Mexico and Pakistan."
A line overflows the check-cashing joint,
Day laborers, brown and black, speaking the language of staccato,
Delivery system of services to a vertical world.
Within, the pungent reek of curry, the stench of work...
A clerk, burly, disinterested,
Sits behind an inch of glass, sliding damp Benjamins
through a slot that separates him from his customers.
Huge silver pistol lies on the counter next to him,
Handy.
A wall of cigarette cartons looms above.
Grape soda, a pack of Newports, 
A fistful of folding money,
No longer exhausted from the week gone by,
The workers mobilize, energize...
Lured by a promise of barstool women and bottom-shelf vodka, 
An electric bill paid... 
Friday, the night is endless, the day laborers awake.
Saturday, broke and broken.
Sunday, a climb up four flights of stairs 
Residing in shadow
To sleep.
​
©2017. Sarah Ito. All rights reserved.

​POTLUCK AT THE AIDS HOSPICE 
(Come As You Are, Not As You Were)

AIDS hospice, lower Second Avenue, 6: 02 a.m.
A city bus lumbers to a stop with its low hiss of hydraulics, 
on a grimy block of tenements and package stores 
that only sell pints.
It is a Tuesday.
The building is an uncertain shade of brown,
adorned with vulgarities of spray-can-graffiti in blood red and yellows.
Lights come up slowly, as if reluctant to cast their harsh fluorescence 
down cinder-block halls.
The weather outside, sticky and sweet, inside the hospice, sticky . . . 
and sweet.
A cloying sweetness overwhelms, like fried dough at the state fair,
and rotting fruit.
Here, walls, floors, plastic-covered sofas are all the color of buttermilk.
In the first light of someone's last day, the team assembles . . .
Blue gowns, blue latex gloves, white surgical masks so deceivingly soft, and goggles.
This is another world, an alternate universe 
that reeks of bleach and death,
viewed through goggles.
A thin cry of "Mommy" escapes from a narrow room, 
no nameplate identifies the patient, only a number--
Number 15—where a young black man lays on top of a hospital bed, 
sheets drenched by night-sweats, 
sopping wet.
A Romanesque face collapses into itself,
cheekbones no longer able to support the flesh,
skeletal frame topped off by tufts of bright yellow hair;
Adonis knee-capped by a virus.
"Mommy . . ." he cries again, to no one, as the track of a single tear trickles across his sunken cheek,
his skin, chalky and peeling, like old stained wallpaper, 
his eyes, wide open, see nothing.
A team member closes the door, and moves on.
Another team member pushes a metal cart, laden with tubing, syringes, 
towels and gauze,
and plastic jugs of bleach.
No one speaks.
"Mother! Oh, Mother!" calls out the patient in Room 17. "Mother, please come, Mother, please!"
The team stops again, and with a nod, tubing is selected, a needle attached, 
and a single gowned nurse enters, tentatively,
a spectral wraith moving through the gloom, 
as Number 17 falls quiet, and lesions are cleaned and dressed.
And physical pain is medicated
for a short while.
A framed photograph sits on the bedside table;
a radiant young woman, the essence of a debutante, 
now Patient Number 17,
beaming at the photographer, a spotted puppy at her feet...
With her, a man, young, handsome, his hair black and flowing, arms wrapped around her,
as if to protect her
into eternity.
Number 17 no longer resembles that carefree young woman.
Number 17 no longer resembles a woman.
Looking at the photograph, the silent attendant feels the salty anguish rising, 
but in the Aids hospice, tears cannot be wiped away with latex gloves,
and no tissue can penetrate the protective goggles.
Day drifts into the agony of night;
the screams and cries for a mother who has long abandoned her child
become less, and then cease.
Photographs become contaminated items, to be boxed up and burned,
no longer a window into someone's previous life, 
a keeper of happy memories,
just trash.
The room numbers are reassigned to the next incoming patient . . . 
an identity defined by random digits.
So, passes one more day, a twenty-four hour 
limp to the finish line.
In this world of bleach and death
and patients by-the-numbers,
that ends for some at 6 p.m. with the punch of a timeclock,
for others, it just ends.
​
© 2017. Sarah Ito