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While my Wife Is in the Hospital Recovering from a Stroke
by Richard-Yves Sitoski

April 21, 2022 Contributed By: Richard-Yves Sitoski, Ryan Rusiecki

While my Wife Is in the Hospital Recovering from a Stroke
Albany St, Poughkeepsie, New York (2022) by Ryan Rusiecki

In this house I enter sleep like a freezing lake, slowly, so the air
     isn’t knocked from aching lungs. Toe, ankle, shin.

Then I’m awake and smashing the ice from below.
     There’s nothing to eat but fruit from baskets sent by friends

and I couldn’t care less about the fate of the world.
     When I read I lose my place between subject and verb.

The car is the fake tier of a wedding cake, fondant covered,
     and the few brown leaves attached to branches make the trees

look even colder. I miss those muffled walks we took
     in pelting sleet though the bundling up was better

the way that girding myself was better than my first kiss.
     If I’m right, last night had a different weight from the night before.

But which was lighter I cannot say, any more than which
     of these two spoiling pears I hold in my unshaking hand.


RICHARD-YVES SITOSKI (he/him) is a songwriter, performance poet, and the 2019-2022 Poet Laureate of Owen Sound (Ontario, Canada), on the territory of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Fire, Train, The Fiddlehead, The Maynard and a whole bunch of others. He is the 2021 John Newlove Award winner and a 2021 Best of the Net nominee. His latest book is No Sleep ‘til Eden, an augmented reality multimedia collection of poems on the environment. Visit him at rsitoski.com

RYAN RUSIECKI grew up in Westchester County, New York and received his BFA in photography from Bard College in 2020. He currently lives in Kingston, New York where he is pursuing a body of work that investigates the complexities of the recent migration to the Hudson Valley. See more of his work here.

Filed Under: Featured Content, Featured Poetry, Poetry Posted On: April 21, 2022

Further Reading

[THE MUFFLED SOUND OF THE FRUIT] by Osip Mandelshtam (translated from the Russian by Alistair Noon)

The muffled sound of the fruit as it carefully breaks from a branch, amid the incessant chant of the silence, deep in the woods. 1908 Return to table of contents for Issue 3 Fall 2010

LUCKY’S SOLILOQUY by Robert Loss

One afternoon I couldn’t think straight. I’d just come home and dropped my valise on the hardwood floor when I realized that I’d forgotten to wipe my snowy, muddy shoes on the rough rug in the kitchen. I thought of the rug in that way: “rough.” In what way could a rug be “rough,” I […]

SELECTED VIDEOS: 1971-1984 by David Starkey

   All About Me I’m pretty sure this was my first video.  Or maybe my second. *    Sucker Punch Here I am, giving myself a bloody nose. *    Maha Mantra There were still lots of Hare Krishnas in the big airports back then. *    The Perseids The bulb in my strobe light burned out, so […]

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