My father dies in the night
That afternoon he said to us ‘get me out of here’
I know this is what the doctors have done
It’s called pain killing
The next day we go to see him
His face is colder than I’d ever imagined
My mother dies at an hour I’m not told
It took less than a year
She floated on a general anaesthetic
up a river I’d never heard of
into a small room
where at the end she could say nothing
As a child I remember them covering my face
and the ticking machine that was also a river
a dark delta land full of birds
I remember its ether breath
I sometimes still smell it in my dreams
I wonder who decides to turn it off
Jill Jones’s most recent books are Viva the Real, Brink, Breaking the Days (shortlisted for the 2017 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry), and The Beautiful Anxiety, which won the 2015 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry.
