Right Through the Heart

by David Boski

stabbed in Phoenix

by a kitchen knife

recklessly thrown

into a reusable grocery bag, 

six hours into the trip.

a few stitches and a tetanus

shot later, I thought the trip

couldn’t get any worse than

that, but I was wrong.

two days later my mom told

me she was diagnosed with 

pancreatic cancer and that

they thought it had spread to

her liver. stabbed again, right

through the heart; this time,

stitches and a tetanus shot

wouldn’t help.

By David Boski

the pain slowly starts

to fade away

and

dissipate 

which momentarily 

feels nice

except that

there’s more to come

and

you never know when

it’s going to show up 

and

rear its ugly head again

but in the mean time

you suppress 

feelings

and

emotions

and 

continue 

with the day-to-day

pretending to be normal

pretending it’s not eating

at you

like vultures

slowly

picking away at a dead corpse

during a sky burial—

you’ll never escape

no matter how hard

you try.

By David Boski

One of our last conversations 

involved him asking me why

we decided to bring him back

after his first suicide attempt.

I told him we didn’t know for 

sure that’s what it was:

he survived the second attempt as well

and now I was sitting in the living room

having a conversation I never thought

I would have with my father;

a conversation of death, a goodbye of sorts.

we were painting their house so that they

could prepare it for sale,

he could no longer walk up

the stairs to get to bed,

the couch is where he was forced to sleep,

nurses came to give him food and to

bathe him everyday.

I could see the pain in his eyes

as he told me that this was no longer life,

and he asked me to let him go in case

he didn’t quite get the job done again next time.

made me promise I would make sure my mother

and my sister did the same.

he reached out his hand, we shook and embraced.

I didn’t keep my promise, because I didn’t have to:

the third time was his charm, and he finally made it.