the room, boots clacking a Goodbye. All I wanted for him to say was, “You notice the world,
Margie. You notice the world like you do.”
I felt the chest, sweaty and heavy under my skull. I inched my fingers across the wood,
found the clasp, my breasts rested against the fine handiwork. I listened to the lid swing up like
the whining of a cat in heat. I looked down to find another life, a life he’d kept so carefully from
us. Instead I saw a few old blankets, dusty from being kept all alone for so long. Dull, grey
blankets. I searched under them frantically, my hands pawing at the barren bottom. It was then I
felt something so deep inside me, it couldn’t have been mine. I had to give it back. I beat my
skull against the hard ground until it throbbed with the force. Earth filled my tangled hair and
ants bit at my bare arms. A sound erupted from a pair of lungs, one of someone who’d never
known poetry, who couldn’t have known poetry. For if they did, they would have seen the
minnows swimming in the shadows, the proud robin building her nest. All I saw, though, was a
darkness quickly covering the stream. I reached up to stroke the blood on my forehead, bringing
its richness to my tongue. I tasted it with vigor, trying to memorize every particle—that was my
own. It was me.
The sound, it continued, so piercing and hollow that it rippled through my veins. I bit my
finger, waiting for the narrow sap. Then I pressed it into the warm, wet earth. I’m not sure why
the sound continued inside those lungs, for I’d found nothing disagreeable in the chest. In fact,
I’d found nothing at all.
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