My Wife Has Alzheimer’s, But She’s Great in Bed

by Al Vorpsan

My wife has Alzheimer’s — there, it’s said

A disease so hopeless it fills us with dread

Still I must tell you, seventy years after we wed:

My wife has Alzheimer’s, but she’s great in bed.

I don’t mean sex the way you might assume

That kind of sex has gone out of the room

While she’s sick, however, she’s rich with love

(Thank God, or whoever is up there above)

We hold each other tight through the night

We talk and laugh and forget our plight

I kiss her forehead, stroke her tummy

She giggles and thanks me with a smile so sunny

Sometimes I simply lie there and cry

While she prays, she says, that I won’t die

The night is long, the sleep arrests

Our terrible sense of hopelessness

It’s really not night magic at play in our room

We are simply escaping the day’s stress and gloom

Her aides dress her, feed her, and take her for walks

Once a proud artist, she always loved to talk

Now its just baby talk, nursery rhymes,

And eat your food, put in your teeth, and ready for pee time?

Yesterday — was it yesterday? When the grandkids came

She was a smiling actress, but forgot their names

I know that look, I read her eyes,

My girl is truly terrified.

The nights are long, the sleep arrests

Our awful sense of hopelessness.

And that is the miracle, seventy years after we wed:

Its small comfort, yes, but she’s still great in bed.

Fat Girl

by Marissa Piesman

I came of age in the Twiggy era, a fat girl in thin times. I wore a girdle to high school every day; control top pantyhose had not yet been invented. The world was run by weight supremacists. Half a century later, curves rule. First the dark girls showed us the way. Now even all the girls are parading their big butts around. I have thrown out my minimizer bras and everything Spanx. 

My obsessively thin cousin Linda is horrified. She told me, “I don’t know why I still try. No one even tucks anything in any more.” Finally, skinny white privilege vanquished.

Sonnet

by Wendy Saul

Breathing our last is not forecast

by birth order and yet I scan the room

not wanting to be eldest, dawdling to outlast

the ones my junior, headed for the tomb.

Being old is new to me. From afar I see  

the honor, but this tongue slyly misspeaks 

my date of birth by a year or three.

Others in view seem equally antique.

Though four years younger my husband, couch prone,

begs a double foot massage, heels lodged

on my thigh, he cares not, refuses to atone

for his ignoring age; calls it mirage. 

Yet still I seek mentors, older and firm

who radiate vigor and lack my concern.

My Hip

By Bert Pogrebin

I didn’t think about my hip until it needed to be replaced.  Now I think about nothing else. Even Trump is not a distraction from my focus on my recovery. The bad hip was totally an age thing. It happens when the hip joint loses its lubricating cartilage and replaces it with pain. But recovery, mercifully, is the reverse of aging: You leave the hospital on a walker, then graduate to a cane, then you’re free-standing, walking without pain, the hip restored to its former obscurity.

Three Poems
by Sparrow

My Feet

My feet are cold;

how about you?

My feet are cold, 

though I’m wearing shoes.

When you get old,

your feet get cold.

My feet are cold;

how about you?

My toes are froze;

how about you? 

My toes are froze; 

what about you?

My toes are froze,

even when I doze.

My toes are froze, 

how about you?

My soles are cold, 

how about you?

My soles are cold, 

how about you?

Strolls and marches 

have cooled my arches.

My soles are cold, 

how about you?

My Method

Gazing

at a

lovely

sunset,

I write 

a poem 

about

hangnails.

Your Eyes

Your eyes

reflect 

the lake

reflecting 

the sky.

haiku

by Esther Cohen

my aging body

less tall less agile less firm

I can still write poems

Our Faces

by Zev Shanken

Our faces resemble genetic misprints of our faces in 1969.

The young technicians in the sky had miscopied the markers,

not yet understanding what it meant to read code.

They tried to be good interns but never listened well.

Even when it really mattered, never listened well.

This took a toll on our DNA, a new word in 1969.

The Mirror
by Lawrence Bush

Everyone sees us as we are,

while we see ourselves

only in reverse.

This is an important reality principle.

Salvage

by Jessica de Koninck

To reverse prolapse 

surgeons hold up the bladder

with the skin of a cadaver.

    Science stitches up

    what gravity pulls down.

Cadaver . . .

More genteel to say organ transplant

better to say donor.  Distasteful

       discussions of corneas, skin, lungs, heart.

The cash and carry

        business that goes on at night might

get detected.  But with casket closed what goes

unnoticed goes unnoticed.  

Picked clean as a car abandoned

in Camden. Hubcaps,

headlamps, grill work for sale.

    The business of leftovers,

          like the time we unearthed a steering arm

         and hood latch for the Renault

at a junkyard outside Worcester.  Kept

that old hatchback running.  So

           at the funeral home I never checked.

I did not ask to look. 

With no formaldehyde, wax or makeup,

          a night and a day would only

           make things worse. To the end

            your skin remained taut,

unblemished, youthful.

       Cancer and infection rot

       from inside out. Your organ

     donor card’s a useless stub. 

      I did not want to look

          at you. Contaminated

            not even good for parts.

The Curio Cabinet

by Dana Robbins

When I am truly old, all my nightgowns

will be brown to hide the coffee stains

I will wear bloomers in summer so

my thighs don’t stick together

go to the farmer’s market

in a big hat with artificial cherries

that shake as I walk

Sometimes I will dine alone

in a restaurant wearing a gray hat

with a tuile veil

I will collect miniature tea sets

and china ballerinas, hide cookies

under the couch cushions

for my grandchildren to find

Maybe I will have an extra bedroom

for anyone in need or perhaps

I will live alone with three cats

and a  Pekinese named Gilgamesh

be over friendly to the cute mail man

After too many years in a gray flannel suit

when I am old, I will take full possession

of my eccentricities, and proudly display

them  in the curio cabinet of my personality.

My Bald Spot

by Lawrence Bush

I can’t see it in the mirror

but everybody else sees it

unless they are blind or very, very short

A yarmulke, which I never, ever wear

would cover my bald spot perfectly

Very funny, God. Very funny.

NIA Means Purpose

by Susan Griss

Have you ever walked a labyrinth? With the first step in, you surrender all choice. One foot in front of the other takes you on a journey through a maze of directions and curves until you’ve covered every twisted pathway of the circle, and your mind is cleansed from the rhythm of your footfalls and the letting go of all decisions. Stepping out of the labyrinth is like walking, calm and centered, through a membrane back into the world.

NIA is like that, but so different. It is a dance/exercise technique that challenges my aging body to find its strength, to remember movement patterns, to test its endurance, to extend its extensions. At the start of each class, we take two steps into the space, where I surrender to the phrasings, tempos, steps, and music that feed my body with the energy it craves. We dance in community, improvising as we weave in and out of each other’s flow. We dance to music that sings, “I cannot do all the good that the world needs, but the world needs all the good I can do.”

When we take our two departing steps at the end of class, it is like walking, calm and centered, through a membrane back into the world. And the part of me that is most stretched and strengthened is my heart.

The Body Departs

by Grania Gurievitch

I love you, I said, gently, to my breast, curling my palm around it. You have brought me much pleasure.

Now it is time to say goodbye.

Stuart Pizer, a colleague, called the night before my mastectomy. 

My wife just had this same surgery last year. I want to share with you our ritual of honoring, even though it may be painful for you to hear. Painful, because we know your Beloved has died and, if you choose to imitate this, you will be alone with your grief. But, I believe opening yourself to these feelings will deepen your experience and you will feel more real. We love you and wish you well. 

Yes, Stuart, it was painful but as you see, unforgettable advice.

Yes, don’t we all honor departures with phrases:

Farewell, it’s been so good to spend time together. 

See you soon, I hope. 

Ciao, Bella! 

Who talks to body parts that part from us? 

Parts. Apart. Depart. Se-par-ate. Departures. 

Departures. 

From the Greek root, ‘pa.’ I believe, like the root, ‘per’ an indication of a journey. 

Undergoing and surrendering to wherever it takes you. 

Spin the word and turn it around. 

‘per,’ experience, going through something, 

John Dewey writes wisely, in Art as Experience, my favorite book on doing therapy.

He tells us to slow down and linger when we see a work of art . . . it is not to be looked at but rather, it’s there to be experienced . . . a ‘going-through, an 'under-going,’ 

An allowing a surrender, even, to the force of the artist’s power to evoke and put you into an unknown emotional state. Great art and love have something in common: “somewhere I have never travelled.” 

I saw the ballet Manon last night. Indeed, I surrendered, once again to love, as one must, to great music, opera, or Rembrandt.

But it’s more difficult to undergo the experience of the departure of your own breast. 

How can I say, goodbye and honor part of my own body?

My breast, indeed you’ve played no minor role, not only in my own life but also in the lives of others who have touched you. And, those you’ve touched!

My breast itself; you even have a biography of your own: of your self-birthing into visibility. You, like the rest of me, needing your own holding and recognition. 

Yes, my breast has brought me great pleasure. 

What a good idea to honor this loss: first by acknowledging what is happening. By recognition and remembering: we’ve been through so much together, breast, so many stories we could tell and laugh over; often ruefully. 

I think I’ve known you, who knows, maybe over fifty years, goodbye breast! Ciao Bella!

Sometimes, you know, you got a bit too big for your britches! Going from C, to D, to double D, for a while when I gained weight. Yes, sometimes, dear breast, it was hard to love you, you embarrassed me. I always laughed when I heard Mae West quoted: at least I know where my ashes go! 

Would kids today, those young self-righteous nonsmokers, even know what Mae West meant by ‘her ashes.’ They probably think of cremation!

I am holding my right breast as I stand in the warm shower, washing myself tonight before my life is about to change tomorrow. 

Goodbye, dear breast, you have brought me much pleasure. 

I have searched endlessly for correct bras to hold you. 

I loved especially to caress you on your right side and sometimes when I did, I thrilled with an uncommon ecstasy. Even more ecstatic, I discovered, late in my teens, was when I lifted my finger lightly to the tip of your nipple. Oh, do you remember? And, then, to be 

touched in that same way by someone else who accidentally divined just how to stroke you. As my Tomasso might exclaim: ‘O Dio mio è o Dio d’altro!’

Never again to happen, right. But, what joys we shared together. As it’s said, grief is the price of love. 

Departures. Parting of the body parts . . . one at a time, sometimes more, they leave us. Or, theyare taken. The way of all flesh, perhaps. The Sufis and others of spiritual inclination, murmur to me: You are not your body. I am not my Body. I am not so sure. 

Embodiment. Incarnation. Goodbye. Goodbye, the sometimes pocked and pimpled but unwrinkled flesh on my face, indeed, also just a part of my body. 

Facial flesh of teenage years . . . goodbye.

This ritual of honoring and grieving loss, extending now in my imagination, is catching psychic fire.

My errant and unpredictable mind jumps ahead, right now, out of this story of honoring the departure of my breast, standing alone in my shower.

No, in fact, it jumped back, to the time together with my husband, we honored the departure of the erectile capacity of his penis. Yes, why not write about what almost everyone experiences, at some point in their lives, both male and female, why is it somewhat shocking to tell the story I would like to tell? It is easier to write about phenomena like NonBinary and Transgender. Hmm, might there be a ritual for saying goodbye to one’s own gender, however ‘wrong’ it felt? 

But, you see, how hard it is to rest my attention and focus on saying goodbye to Tomasso’s erectile capacity. That irrepressible and all-too visible sign, as he said, of how glad he was to see me. 

Oh, I know, Tomasso, it’s not me! It’s your testosterone which is always flowing urgently when you wake up each morning. Insistent and more often than not, a pain in the ass for me. But, you loved the feeling urging you onto to me. Go find someone else. I like you better in the afternoon. Love knows no bounds. That 

penis, soft, then harder, had such tender, thin skin, around it. You showed me how to touch it. Just right, gently, lingeringly, sometimes faster, sometimes more tightly, sometimes even in my mouth. The ways I showed you to touch me. 

(Can one write about such things?). 

The joy and ecstasies and irritations and yes, the sufferings of love.

We learned and taught each other just how to touch each other’s epithelial tissue, the tissuey tissue of breast and nipple and penis, lightly, carefully now, don’t bite! 

Men have feelings too, you said. We also need tenderness and reassurance that we are loved. Even if you’re tired. 

As Tomasso’s disease called ALS progressed, we played to keep ourselves eroticized;to remember why we both wanted life to live. 

When he could no longer lift his hand to touch my breast, I lifted it for him. The erotic inevitably surged inside my body, catalyzed by the sparkle in his eyes, always, ever-ready life his morning penis, surged into its own, shivering and consuming for a moment, excitement. There it is! Here you are! We are still alive, we’d silently whisper. I love you. 

There you are, the light of love, but, the light was getting dimmer. Sometimes, we didn’t feel so well. Sometimes, other body parts hurt or did not cooperate.

The imminence of mortality would dampen our ardor. 

Goodbye, ardor. Goodbye sweet caress. 

Hello, happiness, I think I’m gonna die.

So went the years of departing body parts and finally all of Tomasso’s body parts departed. Goodbye, oseh shalom bimromav, yaseh shalom. Aleinu, v’al kol Israel, v’imru amen: from the Kaddish we say at times of Death, we sing praises. 

Do we always want and have to praise? when we are filled with rage and grief? and more often, blessed bland denial. Denial. Tomasso loved to repeat the mantra:

‘Denial, dear Grania, ain’t just a river in Egypt!’ Yes, Tomasso, denial. It’s not really happening. That psychic mechanism, they call it, that helps survive the pain of loss. Personally. I think: don’t knock it:

I don’t love you, I don’t even remember you, I don’t feel pain. Blessed be Denial, for however long it lasts. 

Standing in the warm shower, the morning light flickering, now, the honoring-my-breast ritual of the night before, the music beginning to grow more distant: Hold my hand, someone, please! My breast is about to be parted from my body. No! 

You have brought me joy! NO! Please don’t leave me. Make this departure business all go away. 

How many roads can a woman walk down . . . Lyrics come and go, it’s time to go, hello. . . . I love you, yes, my darling, yes — I do remember you, I will. 

Never forget when I remember. 

Oh, here you are, now, 

there you go, go, go, go —