GETTING WELL

  by Cappy Love Hanson



Every time I fall down sick and rise up 
surviving, I know Death’s held me in his foul 
palm like an apple, poked me with a blood-blackened 
claw, and judged me not yet ripe.  He’s exhaled
his necrotic breath across my skin, withered 
my lungs and muscles, before he’s set me 
back on Earth among the also-recovered.  

As he giant-strides away, his cape momentarily 
eclipses the sun like an obsidian blink, its chill 
so brief and to-the-marrow that few of us 
speak of it.  A flicker of static on our car 
radios before everything goes back to normal, and we 
glance over our shoulders only twenty or thirty 
times a day and don’t even recognize we’re that afraid.