Betsy’s in the second stall
practicing
with a plastic razor, so I
lie on the floor
to listen for the janitor,
the cart’s
loose wheel squeaking our
names down
the evening-empty hallway.
the weeks
she was at Lutheran General,
I didn’t
go to visit. but I know from
her stories
what the doors looked like,
closing,
how they strapped her to the
bed
for her own protection. we’re 17
and I adore her despair. I
think she’s shining,
fearless, carving herself a
body that’s nothing
but light. on the way home,
she lets me
drive. tells me there’s a
trick
to disintegrating in
increments subtle enough
not to trip the alarm wires,
to hiding cigarettes
and death from therapists and
parents and this,
all my girls have had down:
how to go and go
until the night is too
fragile or grimy
and then the fanfare, the
wild dive
from the spire, the water
tower, the clock
yanking its hands back, how
to dangle
from the spotlight once
everybody’s
watching. 1999: we lie on
Angie’s futon
searching the phonebook for
institutions
that will take her without
insurance, curl
our bodies into still commas
of want
to wait for morning. they
take
her shoelaces, and her
cigarettes, and I watch.
they give her forms and more
forms
and I watch. they walk her to
the room
with its single bed and
single dresser
and unsmashable mirror and I
ride
the long, high buzz of the
door back
to New York. 2003: Georgiana
is an expert
in suicide and poetry. her
medicine cabinet rattles
like a jar of vengeful bees.
she wants me
to find her. all our idols
are martyrs, not one of them
a saint. her hair drops like
cabernet all the way
to her waist. and how she
needs me. my simple body
becomes bread in her mouth,
I’m whiskey,
an obliteration who’ll get up
in the morning
to call the hospital and make
coffee. oh,
my pretty ones in love with
the beast
of disappearing, there are
many ways
to give birth. not one is
without pain.
there are almost as many ways
to die
as there are to love.
tonight, I drink to you
who chose to keep going, who
moved
through my body like a
chemical
I could not keep. the night
stands outside
like a hungry dog on an old
chain, the scent
of lilies rising from the
half moons of his teeth.
go ahead. tuck your babies
into bed
and lovers’ hair behind their
soft ears, as if
there’s nothing left to fear.