Laura McCullough: Another Winter Sunday (with passive aggression) 

The sound cuts the house’s quiet,  

which hasn’t been calm in a long while. Nail  

clippers, the big kind, the snap not meant  

as the indictment it feels like. He’s trying not to  

call me to help him, but grooming himself 

with the door open, so I’ll be sure to hear it, so I  

will be sure to know he doesn’t want  

to burden you; you do so much already, but only  

makes me feel worse. This business  

of taking care of people is fraught. If he cuts himself  

or, god forbid, falls out of his chair,  

I’ll have new issue  like when we were in the ER  

last week for his imaginary bronchitis,  

his chest x-rays just fine, nothing wrong, except  

everything. He’s lonely, afraid, in my house because  

he had nowhere else to land, and all his systems failing,  

which isn’t fine, but now, when he sits  

alone while we work or clean or take care of the kids  

or go shopping or pay the bills or mow  

the lawn or do the laundry or go to work to make money  

to pay the bills, then he sits inside  

his own mind, alone inside  

the diminishing body, wanting 

any attention he can get: this week  

a fake cough, the week before, the urgency  

about a letter he needed me to find, or the special kind 

of socks he likes or the seven toilet seat risers  

we had to buy trying to get the right fit, or the fight  

he sparks with a family member, or whatever, every week  

a new thing to make him feel he is still alive  

in between the dialysis, and all the different ologists we visit— 

onco-, radio-, nephro-, uro-, cardio—or others,  

vascular surgeons, dentist, his regular GP—thirty years,  

he tells me, I’ve seen this guy thirty years,  

which is longer than any of his marriages, another relationship  

he is about to lose. I think about all of this,  

fuming in my own churlish angers and diminishments, how  

my life has been engulfed by him,  

and the shame, guilt as I listen to the click, clicking,  

the definitiveness of the sound as the jaws  

crash, the strength he still has in his hands to do this, hands  

that, I am sure, held me when I was a little girl,  

which I can’t remember right now, instead, the chronic angers  

of a family’s history boil under another  

quiet Sunday morning, this one with willful inaction on my part,  

of willful attention seeking behavior on his  

part, then a small cry from a once big man, as a cuticle is cut; 

see the small bloodshed, a red pearl forming. 

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(c) 2023 Laura McCullough

Laura McCullough’s books include Women and Other Hostages (Black Lawrence 2021). A three time NJ State Arts Council Fellow, she is a full professor at Brookdale Community College.