Overheard: “We are all God’s poems”

Poetry
Written By Nan Cohen
 

Some of the poems are sick.
For them, breathing is suddenly work.

Some of the poems are well for now.
They sit near the bed and talk.

Or pace the hospital hallway or call
and get choked up on the phone.

Some are far away, thinking of you.
Some are wishing they could cure cancer.

And some of them are nurses
whose work is to access the plastic port

implanted just below the collarbone,
pushing a needle into that tiny heart.

Nan Cohen

Nan Cohen is the author of two poetry collections, Rope Bridge and Unfinished City, and a chapbook, Thousand-Year-Old Words (Glass Lyre Press, 2021). Her recent poems and prose appear in The Cortland Review, DMQ Review, Electric Literature’s The Commuter, and The Curator. The recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and an NEA Literature Fellowship, she lives in Los Angeles, California. nancohen.org

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