Joanna White

To My Parents:

I watch you from above with her, the little girl––furled
bud in the hospital bed, pale as a veiled

moon, wet lashes sealing her eyelids shut. She does not
unglue them to see your fingers drumming on the silver

rails of the bed, see you pluck a ghosted tissue
from the box. Her eyes are closed so she cannot read

the furrows at the corners of your eyes, but she knows
they are there. She can already trace their fissures

in her mind’s eye and feel the rhythm of your tapping
fingers through her skin, tight as a drum to her bones.

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Music professor Joanna White has works in: Examined Life Journal, Healing Muse, MacGuffin, Measure, Sow’s Ear, Earth’s Daughters, Dunes Review, KYSO Flash Anthologies, Cherry Tree and The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), among others. Her first collection, Drumskin and Bones, will be published (Salmon Press, Ireland) March 2021.