Two Poems by Suzette Bishop

Video of My Nephew's Wedding

No audio.

Bridesmaids in black.

The grandmother
who will die
a few months later,
zips down the aisle
in her power chair.

The bride carries a prayer book
with white ribbons.

Shoes like a slide
for the foot's sole.

Her mother and father
give her away.

Her fully lifted breasts
face him as they mouth
the vows.

My mother wishes
she could have given
my sister and I
a wedding like this.

The long veil
covers the altar steps
as snow or a rippling
sheet of ice covers
a mountainside.



Echocardiogram

I saw my heart and all the lightning storms there
in watery sound waves, red electrical eruptions

showing the storm moving toward us
and nothing we can do to stop it.

Pumping under a static gray, gauze screen
sudden yellows, reds, purple-blues,

what I think of you and thought was hidden
inside my heart,

inside my rib cage,
inside my left breast under your palm.

Suzette Bishop teaches at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, Texas.  She has published three books of poetry, Hive-Mind, Horse-Minded and She Took Off Her Wings and Shoes, and a chapbook, Cold Knife Surgery.  Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Jellyfish Whispers, Free State Review, New Texas, Borderlands, Concho River Review, Journal of Texas Women Writers, Aries, and in the anthologies The Four Season Anthology, Imagination & Place:  An Anthology, The Virago Book of Birth Poetry, and American Ghost:  Poets on Life after Industry.  Her poems have won the Spoon River Poetry Review Editors' Prize Contest and Honorable Mention in the Pen 2 Paper Contest sponsored by the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities.