While she gets an MRI

Herman Sutter

November 2, 2025

I sit waiting 

to hear whether she will die 

today 

or a month from now

and there is nothing

to be done 

except wait

in a hard chair

next to an empty one

my butt already tingling 

my back already sore

somewhere beyond the silence

of that door

in a large white tube 

my wife is being ground down 

into bits and bytes

until she is nothing

but a digital report 

on a doctor’s desk

waiting

But aren’t we all waiting

averted eyes empty nods waiting 

just to see:

What will become of me?

All of us here 

waiting

Come      I saved you a chair

Herman Sutter (award winning poet/playwright/essayist) is the author of two chapbooks: Stations (Wiseblood Books), and The World Before Grace (Wings Press), as well as “The Sorrowful Mystery of Racism,” St. Anthony Messenger. His work appears in: The Perch, The Ekphrastic Review, The Langdon Review, Touchstone, The Merton Journal, as well as: Texas Poetry Calendar (2021) & By the Light of a Neon Moon (Madville Press, 2019). His recent manuscript A Theology of Need was long listed for the Sexton prize.