Amuse-Bouche

Brilliant, she thought, studying her own face. Following

the lines like little eroded paths down a hill of dirt.

At the bottom of anything is the top of something.

Before bed she pulls the blinds down in specific order,

then she taps each wall three times with her right pointer finger.

That August I chewed a pill

and slept. A green dragonfly lit

my daughter’s hand on fire. Her new

school planted tens of thousands

Because all the birds do not fall

frozen from the trees,

and the squirrels do wake in time, most of them,

from their torpor, to the memory of nuts

under the snow lying inert for the whole bitter season;

Calm app, chiropractic, codeine, Coke (the drink, not the drug, although Freud took cocaine for his), coffee, Compazine suppository (anti-emetic), counseling, craniosacral therapy, dairy-free, darkness, denial, driving myself to the ER with a barf bag, earplugs, energy healing, exercise, Fioricet (butalbital, acetaminophen, and caffeine), Flonase, ginger ale, gluten-free diet, hot bath with ice pack at back of neck, hot shower

Through the tender bone

you only see a gaping hole,

point out just how hollow

this pelvis is—so full of sky,

the moon phasing,

Exercise: v. middling, meddling, 500 years ago—To put into action. Circa 1340: to raise from the dead. Circa 1729: to exercise one’s tongue. To practice one’s genius. To exercise one’s pipes. To bring to bear. Circa 1738, of Psalms and Hymns. A prompt of no serious exchange—except one’s rights. Take advantage of property laws. Speak out. Hear me out: i.e. to exercise power.

The year I turn 9, my father hurls a telephone across the kitchen. My dad has just received news of a friend’s death from brain cancer. I suspect he figures the receiver might as well die too, and wound the kitchen on its way out. By the time he is shoved up against his own cancer diagnosis, 17 years later, my father is too weak to weaponize telephones.

It was a sluggish day at the salon. Raining outside; a Saturday. The boss lady was on edge all morning, going on about the taxi strikes and the Arab grocer up the street. “Mariana!” she snapped at me twice while tugging a boar-bristle brush through a woman’s gray bob. She doesn’t like when I stare out the storefront window, gnawing at my cuticles.

I met Lia in an ad for her Haunted Doll Hotel. I suppose I didn’t meet her, but her personality was clear:

YOU’RE SEARCHING FOR A HAUNTED DOLL COMPANION.

THESE ARE MY HOURS: WKNDS, 8 P.M. / 4 A.M.

PINE BARRENS. FOLLOW SIGNS.

She was right, and I wasn’t busy, so I drove down there.

At the beach house, Mama cooked whole crabs alive.

Through the steam, we watched them slowly seize up

and stiffen like the dead fish that washed ashore

the day you cut your foot on shattered glass.

When sand stuck to your weeping wound, I couldn’t clean it

You’re waiting tables in Gunnison;

Grand Junction. Fruita is blood-orange dark.

Your hands are covered with silt, dry from the hard water

as you scale the Book Cliff mountains. No matter what

When the apocalypse comes, I won’t be allowed to have Cheerios anymore. Not because at the end of the world, there will be no breakfast cereal, but because if the world doesn’t end, my sister actually thinks there will still be beds to make and carpets to vacuum, and she says she’s tired of stepping on the little O’s that I just can’t seem to keep in my bowl.

A paradox is something that contradicts itself. It seems that all human beings are a paradox within themselves. People hold on to their own moral sense of right and wrong, yet go against it every day. This pattern unleashes us to many different paradoxes of human behavior. We see this loop show itself in many aspects of life, such as defense mechanisms, hypocrisy, and the commonly known paradox of choice.

When she died, they were buttery smooth and still, and buried under mine, palms pressed flat against dry, cotton hospital sheets. I suffocated them with my grief, pressing the fear of going on living without her into the skin, into the stiffness of the bed. When she entered the hospital just days before, they had been trembling…