E. Kristin Anderson
after Soccer Mommy
When the water runs hot I put my body in it to see what will soften.
Today might be Thursday—does it matter? What makes a day
a day? A home a home? I think it's been five years since I last left
my bed and this is another afternoon with a needle bruise in each arm,
waiting for a call with little hope the blood will speak. I know that
I am as blue as the Gulf and possibly just as volatile, letting all manner
of cliché stay inside me with the carcinogens sleeping in my every cell.
How many times have I felt my own brain boiling, too depressed to
walk to my mailbox. And the birds keep singing—as if they would
see me and sober. Lately I keep dreaming my own death and waking up
anyway. I keep writing letters laced with joy but every word in every
notebook looks like iamdying over and over—just scraping the surface
of disillusionment, backed into a summer rain wondering if breathing
is just as futile as my war on fruit flies. What makes a failure a failure?
Some nights the power goes out and comes back on like it never even
happened. I keep checking the stove to be sure it's off. The door to be sure
it's locked. Falling apart is easy. When I tell the phlebotomist I'm going
down, it's like telling her my name. Something outside my window has been
beeping for weeks and I'm too tired to make calls, to find out what it is,
so it's become a noxious refrain in which I'm alive. I'm as steady and
constant as the ceiling fan, as the cable news, as my cat barfing where
my feet will find it wet and sour in the dark. My blood pressure can only
go down from here but it's been low my whole life and I don't know what
that means anymore. So I'm waiting for the ground to cool. I'm waiting
to climb out of this story I keep on my shoulders like a shawl. Waiting in
the mud for the sun to love me like the TV does, a song as I close the blinds.