Paula Schulz
Honorable Mention

It had to come.
Because when you are three and clingy,
your preschool teachers assume
you feel the need for more “mom” time before your new baby arrives.
When you seem sad, even sick, and you begin to limp,
mom and dad feel a doctor visit is in order.

Of the dozen of benign causes for your symptoms,
none of them is the diagnosis.
Neuroblastoma, the mass on your small leg;
stage four because it is in the marrow.
Who could have guessed?
And so it begins:

18 months of chemo, needles, a port, surgery, bone marrow transplants. You are scheduled
to miss the entire next year of school
and you do
(the pumpkin farm, zoo trip, school picnic,
grandparents day, lunch with dad, tea with mom,
pajama day, green eggs and ham day).

So, through there are always balloon launches
where small, sad crowds gather to remember,
To let go ….
It had to come,
the first day of kindergarten.
Facebook posts became progress reports:

Eli’s Super Squad ---
a nod to easier days when you arrived at school
in the Superman costume, complete with cape.
The Facebook news was not always good.
But all the time, gradually,
your body was learning how to rise

above the chemo-kryptonite hair loss,
immune suppression and fatigue.
In some kind of slow motion you were

still faster than the speeding bullet of cancer, you were
leaping the tall-as-a-building probability graphs
not drawn in your favor, you were

steaming the small locomotive of your body into the station.
Powerful.
In remission.