When I glanced down and saw my body,
the suffering, damaged girl.
My beloved, nowhere to be found
had died on impact.
Now the ER doctors say I can go either way.
So I hover on the Sistine ceiling of the
I.C.U., undecided, my dead lover’s
hand reaching for me
like God stretched for Adam.
The tubes and machines that keep me
earthbound give way.
We soar above the hospital morgue,
backtrack the highway, our bodies
unbroken, the crash spliced out.
My mother keens beside my hospital bed,
her fingers tangled in my blood-soaked hair,
picking at pieces of windshield.
Holding tight.
Years later I re-trace the road
between death and Santa Barbara,
how he cradled my head in his lap as he drove.
How he didn’t want to go with me.
How I always got what I wanted.
All my life, such a greedy girl.
First published in Glass, 2017
Header photograph © Jason D. Ramsey.
Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry 2016, Verse Daily, Plume, Rattle, Literary Mama, Diode, Pirene’s Fountain, Tinderbox, Nashville Review, Wide Awake, Poets of Los Angeles and elsewhere. She’s the author of four poetry collections; How I Lost My Virginity To Michael Cohen and other heart stab poems, (2014), State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies, (2015), Enter Here, (2017), and Junkie Wife, (2018). A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly.
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