CRASH

(Part I)

 Throughout the day

it blindsides you

You flinch with your stomach

You learn which vertebrae C1 and T7 are

and what an embolism is

and why he needs four different million-dollar machines

What you don’t learn

are the implications

(And all this

while she sits rocking on her bed

saying Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s in Spanish

counting the little smooth balls of her plastic rosary

while her Papa is perhaps held together with tape

in a dusty one-room clinica

with four dirt parking spaces

or more likely, dead)

You think about how much you collided

with his stubbornness

And now it saves him

and you

You complained because he walked so damn fast

Your legs trotted to keep up

And now you would give your left leg

if he could take one miniscule step

Broken, broken

Breaking you into pieces

Disconnected, disturbed,

insulted, damaged

Swollen bleeding ripping and crackling

Screaming clawing, resting, dying

Hanging on, fighting, waiting

Waiting

Holding together

Falling apart

Out on a limb

Out of limbs

Fucked-up nonsense

You flinch with your stomach

and dream that a split second in time

could be picked off like a scab

and made new again

(Part II)

The scars left were ambiguous

because they were so deep

Deep in the middles of bones

In the under under layer of tissue

And in other places

Things even had to be unscrewed

We wanted to be uninterrupted

We liked our former notions

of give and take

Once upon a time

the sadness took more

than we could give

and gave more than

we could take

But the bandages were finally torn off

White flags after the surrender