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RESCUE CONDITIONS by Carrie Shipers

July 1, 2011 Contributed By: Carrie Shipers

Like fairy tales, my mother’s stories were meant
to order the world: Once, there was a fourteen-
year-old girl, a windshield, a barbed wire fence.
Once, there was a man your father knew,
a gravel road, a cargo rack, a passenger
pinned like a frog.

I used to imagine myself
victim of more benign emergencies:
a fainting spell at school; a car accident
with no injuries except one long, dramatic cut
that wouldn’t scar; my head hitting the gym floor
so hard no one would let me move.  I wanted
to be rescued from what wasn’t my fault,
the stretcher and straps a glass coffin to bear away
my blameless body.  Instead, I was bitten
by a poisonous spider.  I broke my ankle,
caught bronchitis, was dehydrated by the flu.
I lived by the rules my mother made:
Wear your seatbelt.  Stay away from guns.
Don’t drink or take rides from people who do.
Lie to me and you’ll be sorry.

Always, I heard
warnings she wouldn’t say: If you die in pieces
on a dirt road it takes two hours to find; if you slit
your lover’s throat and try to slit your own,
trailing blood all over the house; if you fall down
in a cornfield and no one knows till you start
to rot—don’t make me be who finds you.
I never said how much I needed to be found,
to feel her gloved hands holding mine and know
she’d save me even from the ending I deserved.

 

Return to table of contents for Issue 4 Summer 2011

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: July 1, 2011

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They say it’s a matter of attrition. Cut to / a caravan of sand carried by vehicles, couples racing toward the sun. They’ve driven for so long that the horizon is now their god, heterosexual the altar piece. Chemistry / their borrowed electrons, from and by, in the process of synthesis—children, compulsory futures, drugs to […]

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The subject of the fan is a mere suggestion, open to interpretation.   Painted bat wing, paper leaf, it knows its way in the dark.   Both shield against light and quickener of flame, the fan’s act   of concealment perfects flirtation, graces grief. Folded in on itself, dipped   in clear water, then—flashed and […]

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