Ann Chinnis
Grief as Current and Tide
for Erin
Late night in the ER, I pull up your MRI on the radiology screen and scroll slowly, watching bones coalesce and vanish: your skull’s crown, orbital sockets, nasal septum, sinuses. I stop at the gray, ragged oval. An MRI uses 400,000 voxels to display a brain—tiny 3-D boxes stacked next to each other. Some night, I see part of you in a voxel—your head thrown back laughing under your purple butterfly tree. Once, I even shared your voxel in the Albuquerque twilight. We cheered as hot air burners breathed life into nylon, each balloon a sunrise in the darkening sky. Other nights, you are not there. All that is there are things I do without you, dear friend: work this nightshift, watch a sun set into Cheat River, stare at images of your recurrent glioblastoma. A recurrent tumor goes into remission and returns. A recurrent artery loops away from its origin, blood running upstream. Once while trolling the river for rock fish, my motor coughed a cloud of oil and died. I turned my skiff against the current to paddle. Waves drummed my bow in circles. Brackish water splattered my glasses. The tighter I gripped my paddle, the more it slipped from my hands. A current is not the same as a tide. Tides bridle the surge of water, but my grief never ebbs. It blankets me like creek mist at dusk. I restack my losses into your voxels—a pine cabinet, white dinner plates edged in gold. Dragging the mouse quickly to blur your tumor, I rest the cursor on the date of your birth.
Ann Chinnis is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, 2025 and the author of three poetry books: “Poppet, My Poppet,” “I Can Catch Anything,” and “Love Song: Port & Starboard.” Her work has been published in Sky Island Journal, River Heron Review, Gyroscope, and Crab Creek Review, among others. She is a retired Emergency Physician and a leadership coach and lives with her wife in Virginia Beach, Virginia.