Last First Night

I pose we smoke
(the pleasure we can
still partake in)
but
7 becomes 8
8 becomes 9
and you are still
on the other side
of the locked door,
ursus in hibernation.

So I mark time
mull red wine
with cardamom
and lemon peel
pour the spirit
into porcelain
teacups and pass
to my teenage children
late popsicles
on a summer night.

At 11:55 you appear
your once strong body
fading with the year
you hobble a few steps
in striped pajamas
that Jew from Treblinka
watching Anderson Cooper.

I graze your shoulder,
strands of
your silver hair-
too weak to inhale
you peck me instead
with chapped lips as
your last year begins.

Stacey Z Lawrence teaches Poetry and Creative Writing in a public high school in Northern, NJ. She is working on her first book of confessional poems which explores the untimely death of her husband shortly followed by her bout with Breast Cancer.