i. office
“Just a pinch, and you’ll forget you’re a woman.” No stairs, no hangers, no suicide. Only a scrub-laden stranger wearing a strikingly stupid smile. His instrument of choice? Metal scissors to make the baby brick inside me shrink, to sever the red forget-me-not string from her heart to mine. Tomorrow her crescent moon fingernails would have started growing; I wonder if she wanted to claw her way out.
ii. transportation
I slip out of my clinical robin-dead-egg-blue clothes and cry on the way home. A freckle-eyed fuck on the bus watches my knees shake. His orgasm dreams flash my way; my ovaries burn. I am already on fire. Don’t you dare plant more bombs inside.
iii. destination
In an empty house I dream of exit wounds between thighs; the bullet cuts straight between a baby’s big eyes. My dead baby’s big eyes, her baby blues. Nightmare after nightmare, I re-tie the snipped forget-me-not string and remind the silence: my eyes are brown.
Jessica has walked through fire looking for The One; the stove is hot, so she keeps touching it. She writes with burnt hands.
