Cortney Davis’ “The Last Heartbeat” explores her competing identities as daughter and nurse at her dying mother’s bedside. Davis opens the poem as she holds her mother’s hand, counting her last heartbeats, witnessing her last breath. She ends with greater questions of life and soul as she walks with a friend through a cemetery.

Writing Prompt: If you’ve been at the bedside of a loved one as they died, what do you remember most? What have you forgotten? What about at the bedside of a terminal patient? Did this experience prompt greater questions about the soul? Write for 10 minutes.