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Reduced to Nouns
Amy Haddad

In grade school, I could conjugate verbs
slick as you please, slide from the present
to the past with ease. Even irregular verbs
were at the tip of my tongue.
I knew my Je suis from J’etais, imperfect
from the conditional until my thirties
when the tense I wanted hid from me.

I moved to the near future,
untied verbs from the tense, inserted going to . . .
before each infinitive, then filled in the blank—
I am going to eat, walk, play,
manager, marcher, jouer. There is conviction
speaking this way, diminished in the present
tense, absent from the past.

On our last trip to Paris, even infinitives
were too much for me.
I spoke only in nouns, propped up by desperate
charades. A bellman who understood
he was dealing with a pleading toddler
patiently watched me wave my arms
to outline the shape of a large car.
Une grande voiture.
I pointed at our suitcases, Quatre bagages,
proud I could still count to four.

—
Amy Haddad is a poet, nurse, and educator who taught in the health sciences at Creighton University where she is now a Professor Emerita. Her poetry and short stories have been published in the American Journal of Nursing, Janus Head, Journal of Medical Humanities, Touch, Bellevue Literary Review, Pulse, Persimmon Tree, Annals of Internal Medicine, Avi Magazine, DASH, Oberon Poetry Magazine, and the anthologies Between the Heart Beats and Intensive Care: More Poetry and Prose by Nurses (University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, Iowa) and Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies (Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio). She is the 2019 recipient of the Annals of Internal Medicine poetry prize for “Families Like This” for the best poem published in the journal. She won third-place for the 2019 Kalanithi Writing Awards from Stanford University for her poem “Dark Rides.” Her first chapbook, The Geography of Kitchens, was published by Finishing Line Press in August, 2021. Her first poetry collection, An Otherwise Healthy Woman, was published by Backwaters Press, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, in March, 2022.

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