The nurses could set their watches by me, 

trekking to the bathroom every half hour, 

left hand braced against the IV pole as I 

rolled it to the toilet. A metronome beep 

tolled each time the infusion pump delivered 

a pulse of water into the vein crossing 

the front of my elbow, a sound I barely 

noticed anymore, my second day in the hospital. 

The tiny plastic colander in my hand 

was supposed to catch my stone tumbling out.

A splintered barrel pitching over the falls—

I hoped—landing rock bottom in the basket 

while I stood before the toilet bowl. 

Twice I thought I flushed it from my body 

in a sloshing stream of urine. Just tiny blood 

clots, the head nurse said. She seemed 

as disappointed as I was. I fell asleep 

knowing the doctor planned to operate 

the next morning if the stone still was stuck

inside me. Later that night, awakened 

by a dream, my bladder bursting with cloudy 

urine and blood clots, I rose from bed 

for the bathroom. Passing a neighbor’s room, 

I winced at the “Droplet Warning” sign 

still taped to her door: “Prior to entering: 

Clean Hands, Mask and Eye Protection.” 

(Covid, for sure, as if the staff in HazMat 

suits weren’t a dead giveaway.)

 

As I shuffled past the nurses’ station—

again—in my light-brown hospital socks, 

white silicon treads on the bottoms of my feet 

for traction on linoleum, I recalled the dream 

fragment that roused me from sleep: 

my mother was trying to get into my 

glass-doored hospital room. Her hair 

swooping in the tight-curled Italian bob 

she wears in my parents’ lone surviving 

honeymoon photo, Niagara Falls 1956.

Short-sleeved, white-bloused arm stretched 

across a safety railing, pale water clouds 

and grayscale foam billowing behind her. 

Dead so long now, 22 years, she’d forgotten 

how to open a sliding door. And I wasn’t 

much help in the dream, unable to lift myself 

from bed. The two of us frozen, looking 

at each other through impenetrable glass. 

 

Out of nowhere, she opened her mouth 

to sing, as if her voice alone could slide 

the doors apart. I woke before I heard a single 

note. Drapes pulled across the doors, 

pain still shredding my left flank, a jagged 

pebble still lodged somewhere between 

my kidney and bladder. Two decades since 

she died and I don’t remember the sound 

of her voice strongly enough to even dream it—

which shouldn’t surprise me, I guess,

since I’ve only kept one recording of her and 

haven’t listened to it since she died: a cassette 

from 1996, an afternoon she spent recounting 

stories from her childhood for new poems 

I was writing. Shocking, back then, to hear 

my mother say the old men in her neighborhood 

supported Mussolini until the U.S. declared 

war on Italy. How proud she was to tell me 

her father read Italian newspapers out loud 

for the neighbors who were illiterate. That old 

cassette sits in my desk drawer as if just another 

object, an artifact. I can’t bring myself to play it, 

even after the dream, afraid if I hear that dead 

voice once more, I’ll lose her all over again. 

The weirdest part of the dream should’ve been 

my mother trying to croon apart the hospital doors. 

But she sang her way out of breakdowns all the time 

when I was a kid—she once confessed to me 

she remembered almost nothing before 

the age of fifteen—Italian folk songs from her 

childhood, tunes so old I assumed they already 

were relics by the time she learned them. 

She sang standing at the kitchen sink, staring up 

at the cupboards, possessed, water pouring 

over the dishes, her back to me. I wanted

to keep it like that, stay out of her way

—long enough, at least, for her to stop 

singing and get back to talking to herself. 

“I don’t know whether I’m coming or going, 

Anthony,” she’d say, once the storm had passed.