When I got an email about “with dignity and compassion,” I considered the radiance of the dead, or more precisely that moment before death. I’ve never seen this myself because my dead are the kind who wait politely until everyone is out of the room, needing solitude or something like it for shuddering their way out of this life. We want to possess compassion at the end even though few of us are unaware of the last smells and the constant beeping of monitors. I’ve read about zen hospice deaths. No one I’ve watched die has been particularly zen. Even my grandfather who died for a moment years before he left this world, could not talk clearly from the viewpoint of the dead.

Perspective 
blurs as night 
approaches. 

Sight is an overvalued 
sense in the dying, left 

with ambient noise. 

—Long-listed Finalist in MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #4

Carol Dorf

Carol Dorf has received fellowships from the Hawthornden Foundation, Latitude for Art, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and Zoeglossia, as well as Best of the Net and Best Microfiction nominations. Their writing appears on the Poetry Foundation website, in several chapbooks, and in the periodicals About Place Journal; The Cincinnati Review; Pleiades: Literature in Context; Rogue Agent Journal; and Scientific American magazine. Founding poetry editor of Talking Writing, they taught math in Berkeley USD.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ The Gift of Analog Time, poem by Carol Dorf in ONE ART (2 April 2026)

⚡ Conditional, microfiction by Dorf in The Cincinnati Review (April, 2026)

⚡ Peligrosa, poem by Dorf in Poemeleon Volume XI (Spring 2020)