Cal Freeman
He tried to raise his arm from the gurney to wave to his wife. Her back was turned. He was released and then recaptured over a period of months. The sheets on the bed were so thin no one in the ward could use them to hang themselves. He received an ominous welcome from a man who had been back and back.
Everybody has a blue ward like this inside them. It’s best to find a swimming pool on a summer day. They say it’s best to focus on swimming rather than wading. Swimming blurs the ponderous bodies around you; wading serves up memento moris in the field of vision like the quattrocento’s innumerable skulls.
The second person will smack you with its foam noodle if you forget to use your legs to propel your ugly self. I myself have come to bristle at the word “body.” It’s the “My body is a _____” figurative constructions, so tin-eared and self-indulgent. It’s the putative self, not the body, that swims.
The goddamn days when it rains and there’s nothing inside but stacked unread books and dirty dishes are the ones that necessitate a group session where I could admit I had a half dozen shots of Tullamore Dew with my friend whose soon-to-be-ex-wife told him she’d see him at his funeral when he picked up his 78s earlier that day. You have to hyphenate such tortuous terminated relations to get the sense across.
Certain assets do become enticing, he admits, but a clean break is what he needs. I mean, a house the size of the bungalow whose lawn his sister’s dog pissed on the other night would not constitute a taxable event at its sale, not even the 15 percent they clip you for with capital gains at the 200K threshold. But those details are for a poem titled “The Realtor Sends the Divorce Attorney Dark Thoughts on a Dark Night” that Saint John of the Cross determined it was uncouth to write.
We listed our six pallbearers, each other among them, acknowledging contingencies that might mean we will outlive this version of ourselves. It seemed nominally hopeful given the setting and the mood. We cried over our late fathers. My friend sang “The Auld Triangle” a cappella then told me, “Hang onto Sarah, man, she is a good one.”
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Cal Freeman (he/him) is the author of several books and chapbooks, most recently The Weather of Our Names (Cornerstone Press 2025). His writing can be found in many publications, including Harvard Review Online, Berkeley Poetry Review, Willow Springs, Oxford American, and North American Review. He teaches at Oakland University.