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.