Heart Stop

They show scenes in hospitals

With the bloody jackets and hands

It’s not like that

You can’t even find your way out of the parking lot

Or the right elevator

They clean up the blood

By the time you get there

Arythmia means irregular beating

And I feel that now almost every day

They put her just dead body up where I could see it

Arms to her sides inside the bag

Beneath the fall sky my dog plods through the monkey grass

I hear her say I’m not what happened in that car

and I’m so sorry you had to get to me like that,

tearing down the highway trying to reach me alive

I know, Mom.

The body can only take so much steel and plastic and glass

Shards emerged from pockets, papers, presents with bows

Her heart fought a long time

Maybe if it wasn’t raining, or she had been in a city

I pass the place the truck hydroplaned into her

From the north the road is like a plain

There’s a circle of water next to the barbed wire

Do I put something there?

Pericarditis is inflammation

It seemed like a heart attack but we walked out of there,

Went home to rest

Halloween is two days away

I just found our decorations — the leaves and pumpkins and turkeys,

A generation of brown dust covered me

And doesn’t come out

I go to teachers and ask them where she is

Is she alive somewhere

Will I see her

Smell her skin

My first ever body

Before I knew my own