When Dad Lost Use of His Arms

When Dad Lost Use of His Arms
by Scott LaMascus

He wrote his jokes with nimble fingertips,
keeping them pithy, all the better to surprise. 
Even the flies think I’m already dead, he quipped. 
We laughed as his eyes twinkled out from silence,  
but I couldn’t tell what also lurked behind them,
while I chased pests away with useless clown hands.
What backbone and fierce humor Dad wielded
as the fly circled and he eyed it like a Sphinx.

  • Scott LaMascus is a writer in Oklahoma City whose first chapbook, The Edited Tongue (Bottlecap 2025), provides a medical memoir of his family’s experience with ALS. These lyric and varied poems arc from his father’s mysterious symptoms to the loss of his voice, from diagnosis and the onset of difficult, daily care, through hospice and death in the family home. Each daily devastation of the brutal disease called Lou Gerhig’s is not recorded in tedious detail, but rather are sampled in poems which continually surprise, from grief, humor, fantasy, lullaby, ode and dirge. Scott’s Ph.D. is from the University of Oklahoma and his MFA from Antioch University, Los Angeles. His debut collection of poems, Let Other Hounds (Newburg: Fernwood) is forthcoming in late 2025. Email: slamascusATantioch.edu

For further reading on ALS and healing, see: see: My Singing Angel by Jane Babin. 

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About David Elpern

The Online Journal of Community and Person-Centered Dermatology (OJCPCD) is a free, full text, open-access, online publication that addresses all aspects of skin disease that concern patients, their families, and practitioners. ​It was founded in 2012 by Dr. David J. Elpern, M.D. in Williamstown, MA. with technical help from Inez Tan.

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