Photography © Chad Parenteau

 

After Tennessee’s attempt to execute Christa Pike failed, hospital staff placed her on a ventilator and began clearing pentobarbital from her system. Her death sentence remains. Two institutions pulled at the same body in opposite directions. The machine, strangely, was the one preserving life. “Protocol” began there.

 

Protocol

The ventilator lifts her chest
and lets it fall.

It does not know Christa.
It does not know Colleen.
It knows pressure, oxygen,
the small arithmetic of staying.

Doctors work the poison
out of her system.

The poison leaves her.
The sentence does not.

And still the ventilator
lifts her chest
and lets it fall.

 

Eric Goldfarb writes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and flash. His work has appeared in Rattle, Hippocampus Magazine, Sky Island Journal, ONE ART, Third Wednesday, Panorama, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife in Atlanta.

Chad Parenteau is Associate Editor of Oddball Magazine.