The Daisies
curve over the top of a green glass vase at the center of the oak table. I’ve cut the flowers too long so after four days they look translucent and gorgeously weary, like dancers in costume after a rehearsal. The sound of the occasional car drifts through the open windows. Further off, someone is moving their lawn. In the late summer light I sit down with a notebook and try to write out lists of tasks I’ve been thinking about for weeks. All the cleaning I have to do, the new job I need to find, the friends I should try to get back in touch with, the friends I’ve lost for good. I do my best to will my hand into writing out the new healthy diet I will follow and the contingency plans I should make, just in case things don’t go the way the doctors hope. Then there are the other lists, the ones that will include all the trips I’ll take if I keep living and the love I’ll find though I haven’t found it yet and the novels I’ll finish writing and the elaborate desserts I’ll actually bake and the little black bikini I’ll finally buy. It seems strange that it’s summer, or maybe it seems strange that it’s summer and I’m still there, in my house, at my table, sitting before an overfilled vase as cars full of people rush to wherever people rush to. In December I lay in a wilted body at the center of a maze of tubes. To raise an arm or a leg took effort. To breathe took effort. On Christmas Eve I pushed myself out of bed, clinging to my IV pole as I maneuvered myself toward a row of regulation chairs at the end of the hospital floor. Through the plate glass windows, far below, a Christmas tree shone in darkness, its needles clothed in a universe of LED lights. I’d like to say I imagined all the kids in their beds trying to fall asleep and all their parents assembling bikes incorrectly and all the other kids in other countries starving inside their skins and the terrible, unpredictable unfairness of the world. I’d like to tell you I wondered about God. But the truth is I wasn’t thinking about anything—just like I’m not thinking about anything as I sit here at my kitchen table six months later. The sunlight falls across the floor in wide squares. The ballerina daisies spill over the top of the vase. The wind streams through the windows and ruffles their ghostly skirts.
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The story behind the story:
I wrote this shortly after I finished a grueling six months of chemotherapy at Dana-Farber. That was preceded by two equally grueling operations that kept me hospitalized over Christmas and New Year’s. It was a strange, unexpected space to be in and I was grappling with how to think about it all. Would I really make it? Everything felt tentative, as if the world could shift on its axis without warning. Because in a way, that’s what happened to my life the previous December. I remember giving my last final and stopping at urgent care to get some pain checked out. I called my daughter and told her I’d pick up some tomato soup after I finished with the doctor. We were going to make grilled cheese, watch a movie, and do some Christmas shopping the next day. When I got to urgent care, the woman told me to get in my car and drive straight to the emergency room at the closest hospital. She offered to call an ambulance. That was the beginning of a long journey.
Lori Lamothe has published four poetry books, most recently Tulip Fever (Kelsay Books, 2022). Her writing has appeared in 101 Words, Barren Magazine, Coffin Bell, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Literary Review, Verse Daily and elsewhere. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net multiple times. She is currently an assistant professor at Quinsigamond Community College and a (belated) MFA student at the University of Houston-Victoria.
“The Daisies” previously appeared in Glassworks.
Featured photo by Alistair MacRobert.
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