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  • Sundays at Smilow
  • Christian Wiman (bio)

Sundays are best. The chemo drips through the plastic tube into the port implanted in my chest

and it is quiet, finally, no one weeping beyond the meaningless screens, no one keeping

watch for a doctor to tell them what one more meaningless blood test means, no swine of a man

emboldened by doom grunting urges to nurses, no nurses consumed

with regularity or Ensure or code-redding toward someone’s spastic reactions to their cure.

No cure. The chemo drips through the plastic tube into the port implanted in my chest.

Sundays are best. [End Page 28]

Christian Wiman

CHRISTIAN WIMAN is the author, editor, or translator of ten books, including Hammer is the Prayer: Selected Poems (FSG, 2016), My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (FSG, 2013), and Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (HarperCollins/Ecco, 2012).

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