In the fanfiction of my life I get myself hit
by a car and that’s how you find out you care, that long
moment in the pale hospital hallway, alone with
your dread. Shame is, you said loftily, for other
people. There’s a glimmer of crescent in the sky, shy
like a new girl. We don’t deserve the moon yet we’re given
one anyway, always up there doing something wild
for us to look at. You tell me I’ve dodged your
bullet and what I know of myself is dense, packed
sulfur and charcoal and saltpeter, projectile
aimed at my own throat. If I love you and you agreed
to let me, you’d just do horrible things in four
years’ time. It’s that kind of curse. I fistfight
falling asleep, stay awake out of stubbornness; you
organize, your baking and puzzles and bird walks
along the blue river. I straggle onto the beach most
nights, warn a family of drunk tourists ten cuidado
en las dunas, hay viboras! but probably it’s serpientes,
they are grateful, say my dog is hermosa and I smile
and I say yes she is, thank you. Thank you, he’s a boy. I’m
grateful for the same stupid things over and over:
waking to messages from you, homemade
cookies I admire in your photos, melted ruby
chocolate, rose-pink to fill the well of your thumbprint.
You don’t take selfies but I’ve seen your hands, as if
hands were somehow less intimate. I’ve been trying
to write these fucking lines for days. Do you know not only
coral snakes and rattlers nest in the tall saltgrass but last night
Q and I froze on the boardwalk, spotted by a pair of ghost
coyotes, part wolf, dense fur tipped with gold. They looked fit,
looked lush. They’ll eat a dog off the end of the leash, a woman told me
last winter and these were not one bit afraid. The female
studied the distance. Thought hard about whether
to cut us off. Her mate topped the dunes, and she turned,
decided to go ahead with him. On such luck we live. On
Thanksgiving Day a car pulled up even with mine at a red
light, the man and woman gesticulating but we could not
understand each other through two layers of glass. At last
he made a gesture like turning it on, then pointed
at my trunk. Oh my keys! I mouthed, then two hands
in prayer: thank you thank you. The light turned green, we
were all so relieved. So you see it is possible. I
have to inject myself with something nasty now
and I won’t be able to eat for days so listen carefully
to what you said: it’s uncomplicated to want to touch, to fuck,
to come. You’re the one, it seems to me, ashamed.
JSA Lowe’s book of poetry Internet Girls was published in 2023 by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have recently appeared in Laurel Review, Michigan Quarterly Review’s Mixtape, Missouri Review, Sinister Wisdom, Southeast Review, and Superstition Review, as well as previously in AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Chicago Review, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Hobart, Salamander, and Versal, and her lyric essays in Denver Quarterly and The Rupture. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Houston Clear Lake in film and literature, and she lives on Galveston Island.
