Jeanine Walker

What Really

Every day is a lie. The red leaves turning red
when they should be green, or gone.
Man walking down
the street with a coffee cup not steaming.
The way teeth feel
to the tongue,
always rough, endlessly interesting.

And the husband who doesn't love her anymore
though he tries to, sleeping
in the bed with seven pillows,
light from the lamp
groaning its imperceptibility all night

And when she got a new lung
her son wept. And when he wept
he told the girlfriend
who every day walked around without pants,
in her underwear,
and she shrugged. Just a lung.
I have two.

Nothing could be more beautiful than the replacing
of lung for damaged lung, the body wrenched open,
the old damaged one
removed. How just
a single organ can save
the feel of a late night by a dim window, memoir cracked.

But what is a life, what really? The man drinking his cold coffee
as he waits for the train
in the morning frost. Birds
exposed like wounds in the autumn branches.
The teeth, those doomed
bones, grinding all the way through
an unsatisfactory night.
She ended up dying anyway, the last birds
twittering from a branch. Night was not the only where.
The leaves had turned by then but not yet
fallen. And then they fell,
last breath, last breath.

Jeanine Walker is the author of The Two of Them Might Outlast Me (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2022) and has been recognized with a 2025 microgrant for Korean poetry translation from Seattle City of Literature. Her poems and translations have found homes in Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Jeanine teaches poetry and publishing in Seattle.