My mother awakens in dream-like haze. She doesn’t know what we mean by, “You’ve had a stroke.” Her head aches. Hours wander off in a fog. A week passes, then two. Her thoughts, once quick and deep, now chase their own tails. When she’s transferred to rehab, we watch her relearn the quotidian; in slow-motion, she talks herself through each stage of brushing her teeth, using a spoon, putting an arm through a sleeve. Friends send cards she wants to answer, but her hand can’t remember the ease of a pen, her eyes can’t hold words in place on a page. “I’ll call instead,” she says, “maybe tomorrow.” Her fingers trace circles on the quilt I’ve brought her from home. She tells me again about the party she’s planning to host—shrimp cocktail, wine. She’ll invite everyone. Even the nurses and therapists helping her now. She’ll do it just as soon as they let her out of this place. “When things quiet down. When my life’s back to normal.”

Beside her hospital bed, the list 
of phone numbers she asked me to make. 
Inch-high digits. Thick black marker. 

Each time she starts to dial, she forgets 
which buttons she’s already pressed. 

The numbers double. The room blurs. 

—First Place Winner of MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #4

Jennifer L. Freed

is the author of the full-length collection When Light Shifts: A Memoir in Poems, a finalist for the 2022 Sheila Margaret Motton book prize. In the 2025 Eric Hoffer Book Awards, her memoir received three distinctions: finalist for the Medal Provocateur, second place for Legacy Non-fiction, and Grand Prize short list. Her poems appear in Atlanta Review, Rock Paper Poem, Rust and Moth, Sheila-na-Gig, SWWIM, Vox Populi, and What the House Knows, among other journals and anthologies. She writes, teaches, and facilitates writing workshops in Massachusetts.

Author’s website: https://jfreed.weebly.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Gravity, Ms. Freed’s first haibun, published in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 28, April 2025)

⚡ Six Words in an Ellen Bass Poem Take Me Back To My Brother’s Hospital Room in Atlanta Review (Spring/Summer 2025)

⚡ List of Publications at the author’s website