The Sickness Suite, a little big book of poems by Tim Staley

I’m a sucker for handmade poetry books and magazines. Cheap little things with words on them. Gimme books. Libritos made with a special kind of love. It’s an addiction from growing up into the poetry world in the 1950s and 1960s. In the mid-60s Paul Malanga and I made six issues of a little magazine, FROM A WINDOW using mimeographed pages, whitener, manual typewriters. The results were always miraculous. So I get juiced when something like poet Tim Staley’s The Sickness Suite shows up in the mailbox. It’s 3-3/8ths by 5”. Goofy drawings on the cover and inside. The publisher is Grandma Moses Press. I’d never heard of them. Goes with being an old man. So I googled them. Happily, Grandma Moses Press is googlable. They specialize in little books like Tim’s which are guaranteed not to make money. Hot damn!

But Tim’s little book is not a breezy little book written to make us happy. It’s wonderfully crafted poetry—in a haphazard way—that documents chronologically when Sylvia, the Staley baby, got terribly sick. Her liver was shutting down. Suzanne and Tim were terrified. Their baby little girl would die if she did not get a liver transplant. Period.  

Here’s a little poem from the book (most are longer). The setting is El Paso (eventually, they went to Houston). Tim had chased the ambulance down from Las Cruces where they live. Suzanne must have been in the ambulance. The time of this poem is when the waiting begins and the questions start spinning in the brain. All sorts of questions about life and death, morality, yes and no, sorrow, modern life and medicine, the gut questions of parenthood—

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A JAUNDICED VIEW

At Kinley’s House Coffee & Tea,
a girl in flirty flats slides in next to me,
her liver functioning perfectly, her blood
clotting like batter in a waffle iron. A family
strolls in, mom and three kids, their
gallbladders all draining, filling and tipping
bile as they should except dad forgot his
wallet. Has to walk all the way back to the
Hummer, the capillaries in his liver robust,
nothing like my daughter’s liver, a jellyfish
skewered on a cactus spine. She’s with my
wife nearby wrestling infection in the
nosocomial claw of the hospital, where my
baby’s veins are gateways to super germs
who’ve united, who’ve built up resistance
to antibacterial disinfectants and I wish
I had that gall, that crass resilience.
 

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Suzanne, Sylvia & Tim
What, 2 years later?