Ways to Die While Breathing

I’ve heard this more than once:
     Death
        slides the mind to turbulence and dust,

Anytime
bullets may break my spine   break my spine

I can’t decide if this    scares me or not
          Besides, there are
many ways to die

             in the yellow house, we were alive and not

a split-level set back from the road
        a rock    left of the driveway
where I sat watching morning glories breathe
          whose trumpet petals opened from

     first blaze of day     closed
onto  evening twilight. Life was safer outside
     something solid, rather than my mother’s
  lips   thin/hard      slaps

        sips of beer – frothy cold, summer light
     pale as steaks sizzled –
 we begged for    glasses of Strawberry Hill

We suffered from      caverns
        full of chilly self-loathing
   our faces veiled

At the bottom:   water

Maryann Gremillion’s essays, poems, and short memoir pieces have appeared in Glass Mountain, The Sun and Teachers & Writer’s magazine, or in anthologies through Telling Our Stories Press, MD Anderson’s Cancerwise, and Mutabilis Press. She spends much of her free time reading, currently Carolyn Forche’s memoir and Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be An Antiracist.

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