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Not a one tells it this way, save me: the girl’d aimed to pull herself out
Of herself & skipped first to the lungs. It all fits; it all starts: a slim-
Jimmed doorlock. A lick-threaded needle, fed through knotless. I mean,
What gives. Hold hard & each one/thing slips through the fingers. Can you
Tell I carry inside of me the imprint my truck left on a 5 a.m. deer? We looked
Each other dead in the eye for a slow second & then a warm smack like a failed
Marriage. A bruise tried to cross me off, but only met me halfway. All bodies
A workshop of what isn’t anymore there. There’s loss & there’s talking
About loss, & one will stay immeasurable & one’ll world-without-end be looking
For containers to fill. One eyes the highball & sees the past as half-empty, half-
Spilled. Sugar, I can tell you’re onto me: I want you the way I want someone
Gone. Quick puff of day-moon just waiting to poke holes in my story. Half-mile
Through some trees to the nearest other. I’ll risk any path so long as
I’ve got my dog walking point. Like any driven girl who meets a wolf along
The way, I’ve got my talking points. The mistake is trying the first house you
Come to, door parted open like a close mouth deciding not whether but when
To kiss. Once I come-to, you ask me to set the table. When I say I believe I
Could tell you anything, you dead-pan & hand me a map of love that unfolds
To the life-size of love itself. Each dish you place in front of me features
Some sea animal I worry has the kind of bones you’re not supposed to swallow.
Amy Woolard is a writer and legal aid attorney working on justice system reform, school-to-prison pipeline, safety net, health, and poverty policy issues in Virginia. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Virginia School of Law. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fence, Guernica, and Gulf Coast, among others. Her essays have appeared in Slate, The Guardian, Pacific Standard, and The Rumpus, as well as Virginia Quarterly Review, which awarded her the Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction in 2016.
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