You were six years old when your parents took you to the art museum
and you almost died. Fell down four flights of stairs,
yet stood up with nothing more than a scrape on your bicep.
Mom will call this day a miracle, the day her daughter escaped
almost certain death. Sometimes, though, you wish you could have hit your head
a little harder; chomped down so ******* your tongue that part of it
could have fallen off (and maybe then you could be beautiful.)

The problem is, your mom tells her coworkers that it’s
God’s Gift of Life that you’re still here. Sometimes she squeezes
your hand so hard you’ll worry she’ll break your bones,
which are already so thin, just the way she likes them. (Because
a near-death experience does not justify something like
chubby fingers.) (Even to your mother, who held you in her arms
as you whimpered at the bottom of a staircase and kissed
your forehead as she told you it would be okay.)

Your friends tell you that you’re meant to be here, and they
love you, they really do, and your tongue tastes flat and boring
in your mouth as you clamor for an interesting story to tell, a tale
of survival that will make them miss you
even when they have you, and yet you find
nothing: nothing.

The woman sticks her head out the window
and breathes in heavy air,
fog swimming down her throat into
unsettled stomach. Grumbles and groans
under the weight of morning dew. She can almost
taste the grass from here, imagine the way
it blows in a breeze she hasn’t felt in years.
It used to move her, slide her hair down her
back and now she always wears it up, those
bright red locks tied away where no one can ever
find them. Wet hands glide across glass pane and it is only
now that she realizes her head feels a little too heavy
on her neck. Necklace throbs
against collarbone and maybe
it’s the loneliness, she thinks, the desperate
way she hears the birds chirping
in some unknown distance and she wonders
what it would feel like to move.
She takes a step
away from the window.

hand around stomach, she thinks
(this cannot be right) the way
his hands feel like they are burning
holes in precious porcelain skin she
promised she would save, maybe to
never give away. the way her fingers
begin to web and her mind goes
fuzzy and he’s still reaching
for her, all bone-finger and
finger- bone. maybe this
is what it feels like to
grow into the ground.
feet slide into fertile
mud (slides up her
legs past veiny thigh
purple lines trekking
below soft skin)
branch explode
from arm
waist slim
to bark
eyes rose-
petal pink

In the past five years, you haven’t
stepped foot into a hospital. Unlike your best friend,
whose father had cancer, and unlike your grandmother,
who slipped and fell and broke her hip and
you were vacationing in Ecuador when all of this was happening,
unable to escape from the tropical rainforests to visit
the sick and dying.

Your friends tell you that you’re lucky,
that they’ve been to hospitals twelve times since their birth,
but at this point, anything would be more exciting than
coming home and falling asleep. Even your favorite TV show
can’t keep you awake anymore, and instead of being in surgery
or giving birth,
you curve your spine into a C shape while trying to finish homework
that will never truly be done.

But if you really cared about any of this, maybe you
would drive to the hospital, take a stroll down the maternity ward,
though suddenly you’d remember
that you don’t know how to drive
and maybe you’ll never get out of this place,
maybe this is all there will ever be.

one time, when you were six years old,
your parents took you to the alligator farm,
which is exactly three.02 miles away from the beach, and
your father, with his beefy hands, lifted you up in his arms,
let you peer over the safety railing at the scaly green creatures
below you, and sometimes now you wish he would have
dropped you down. maybe you would have died. or maybe
you wouldn't have, but at least then you would’ve had
a survival story to tell.

perhaps the problem with
starting poems off with a trip to the alligator farm is that readers
expect you to get chopped into sixteen pieces by means of
teeth larger than hands, break your neck, but
there’s no conclusion to this story other than that sometimes
you wash your hands until your knuckles are bleeding,
and that’s by far worse than being swallowed by a reptile,
clawing out your own vocal chords,
dying,

In this story,

she’s made of only blood, flesh, and bone. Her pair of
white-hot eyes trail down polycarbonate
bodies like liquor over skin, yes, I’m moving to
New York next weekend. Yes, I’m very excited. She’s a
simmering bowl of office clerk and
caesius veins, swimming, always swimming.

It’s not like she has a lot of *** or anything, though she
likes bodies against bodies and the smell of
salt and sweat and gasps and heaves and
the thrill. 40s jazz and pill-shaped
freckles; she pulls her sweater down over her hands,
tries to calm down a heart that'll never stop
beating.

God. Yes. Yes to whiskey, yes to the new car, yes to falling
asleep without eating dinner. It’s about the new, the news, the
ivy and the flowers and the way that roses are so beautiful and yet they are
covered in thorns and green is a very pretty color until
jealousy turns everything brown and rotten and it’s all about the

way Venus fly traps are so wonderful and so so cruel.

Your greatest fear is of someone yelling
Fire! in a crowded theater, of the cries of children,
the way popcorn would be dropped, scattered.
Perhaps—if there were a fire, that is—
your body would lock into place,
like ceramic, like a doll,
and you would be able to do nothing except sit there,
heart pounding, blood flowing; perhaps you would press two
fingers to your veins, let the sound of your
adrenaline overpower the way smoke that
doesn’t exist floats through the air, into your lungs,
suffocating you.

Maybe if you try hard enough,
there will be a Fire! in a crowded theater. Maybe, sickeningly,
you want to watch the way mothers would
throw their children over their shoulders, race to an exit.
Maybe you’d rush to an exit, too. However, there’s a chance that
you’ve just normalized death, that you’re afraid of
fear itself, the crackling of flames,
the smell of burning plastic, the color
red,