after Richard Hugo
Richard Hugo says not to choose
the topic,
not to write a poem because
it feels like it should be written.
But has he ever been on a beach
when a man’s body is fished
from the lake,
served on a paddle board,
and rushed away in an ambulance?
Has he
sat, stunned, unsure:
Life?
Death?
Was it a final departure or
a resurrection,
and why are the boats…
Oh God, are they searching?
Or just patrolling?
Visions of a child,
dragged under,
of a man
who tried to save her.
No.
No?
No one’s saying.
A tent rises and falls,
opens and closes,
desultorily waving, mawing,
something else hungry
denied (we hope, both) today.
My mother, her nose looped
with the oxygen cannula,
gasped like that,
mouth wide for her
eternal breath
last month.
I stare at my pale legs.
White.
Drema Drudge is a novelist and poet whose work appears in journals such as The Louisville Review, Suspended Magazine, and The Tulane Review. Her poem “Mutual Mass” received a Pushcart Prize nomination, and her manuscript Waxing the Parasitical Muse was longlisted for the 2025 Idaho Prize for Poetry. Another manuscript was recently named a semifinalist in the Nine Syllables Press Chapbook Contest through the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.