Gail Newman

Fever

From my bed, a window full of sky.
The air washed with light.

A flight of stairs down to bath, bread.
A banister to ease the way.

My husband brings me tea, a cold cloth
for my forehead.

Time unravels the pale hours. Now
it is morning. Now noon.

I am seven. I am five. Dolls jumbled on shelves,
faces white, lean into one another.

The fever breaks slowly. The thermometer
is shaken down. My father rises

from the cot where he has been lying
beside me these long years.

He is just shadow and light. I could stand up
right now, push off and fly out of this world.

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Gail Newman‘s poems have appeared in journals including Nimrod International Journal, Prairie Schooner, and The Atlanta Review and in anthologies including Ghosts of the Holocaust, How to Love the World, Poems of Gratitude and Hope, and America, We Call Your Name. A collection of poetry, One World, was published by Moon Tide Press. Blood Memory, chosen by Marge Piercy for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize won the 2020 Northern California Authors and Publishers Gold Award for Poetry and the 2021 Best Book Awards Winner in the “Poetry: Religious” category.