Alma Singleton

WAITING FOR A HERO

What has life been up to this?
It is just a pattern of mishaps and missteps;
A poorly choreographed dance,
The director a hapless fool-
He should be shot.

The life I lead
A soap opera and not well received,
With drama and trauma,
And a villain and alas, a poor,
Hand-wringing damsel in distress.

Who is this villain you say?
The villain so aptly played
By my illness, is a ticking bomb and
The witless damsel is played
By none other than me.

The villain has abducted the hand-wringing damsel.
She is tired and cognitively impaired,
And tied to this track.
The train, on time, has blasted his horn.
The train is almost there and she still on her back.

Will the villain be outwitted
By a hero who has yet to arrive?
Shall we peek, shall we ponder?
Oh, no, we cannot look,
Perhaps that is for another book.

A pear mottles in a bowl; fruit
flies speckle the kitchen air.
They fogged the tank
in our old Science classroom
as we transcribed their genus–Drosophila.

We knocked the insects out
in fume-stoppered vials,
sexed them to breed in lidded jars;
two weeks later we tweezed
a generation, counted
the pale-eyed males,
and re-opened the text at Hemophilia.

This page we knew: our classmate
Mike and his garrisoned veins,
the hospital stripes we envied
until he missed the yearbook–
his routine treatment a gamble
lost to a bag of dirty blood.

Alma Singleton has Multiple Sclerosis that was first diagnosed in Dec. of 2001. Until recently she was a second grade classroom teacher, but is retiring due to the course of her illness. "Waiting for a Hero" is a bit of bittersweet humor: the villain is MS and the hero is the hope that all of who have MS are waiting for a cure.