Laura Wang

Sick Day's Delirium

in memory of Michael LaGory

I thought I saw you, late beloved friend,

come through the door and stride with artless grace

and certainty of welcome on your face

into the room where our joint students bend

with half-closed eyes over screens or problem sets.

You looked a dream: new-shaven, fitted smart

in crisp celestial blue, such that my heart

(always more gullible than my eyes) could yet

exult that yours did beat again. I sprang

up, running to embrace you—that’s the last

sensation I recall, because just then

the alarm I’d set an hour beforehand rang,

jolting me where I lay in febrile rest

with a new sick feeling, cure unknown to men.

Laura Wang is a high school English teacher in Honolulu, Hawaii, the city where she grew up. Some of her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Christian Century, The Windhover, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, and Bamboo Ridge. Originally trained as a medievalist, she has also published scholarship on Chaucer and on the fifteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson.