Nightfall

Black stitches pierce her throat
Anchor the IV threaded
Down to her heart
A bold hole cut with urgent
Strokes clasps the white tube
Of tenuous breath
Her wife pulls the covers up
To her neck where a sterile art
Worked the flesh
Over starched sheets and parched
Brittle limbs she spreads the new
Creation they sewed
Each patch a fragment of their lives
Transformed to saffron stars

Tabor Flickinger is a poet and primary care physician who lives in Virginia. Her poems have appeared in Pulse, Oracle, the Yale Journal for Humanities and Medicine, and HEAL: Humanism Evolving through Arts and Literature.