Third prize

The Nurses Knew

By Denise Setterington

That Jane was ninety six, grew up on a farm
with her widowed mother, drank coffee black
flew planes in the war, had a stiff right arm

since the stroke, that some lover, from way back
only left when pills from the blister pack
were slipped in her mouth on a spoon of ice-cream.

They knew she’d won money on fights, could stack
a deck of cards, and a word could redeem
a cache of yesterdays.

But there was a crack
in her hippocampus that I fell through
and all their Aricept couldn’t hook me back.

Sixty years of marriage, the nurses knew,
was ballast she had jettisoned for height
as she banked clouds and in her dreams took flight.