The Signs of Choking The Victim Can't Speak or Breathe and the world is silent, a slow blur, each red car in front of you: specific, the strangers around you: pure movement, everything enlarged, then microscopic, trying to get back inside your body, and then you remember your first pillow (smelled of Tide), your first pair of underoos (Superman), [End Page 38] your first swim (afraid to go underwater), your first day leaving home (the Disney-school-bus-lunch-pail in your hand) and how your mother cried in the kitchen window, remember the way everything always never mattered before this? The Victim Collapses again and again and differently with each remembering, and just maybe it was meant to be this way or already happened, always already happening, just maybe the one last thing that matters is how you die, or the one good suit you wore everywhere to everything that made you feel important and happy, or the way you let yourself be touched and tasted and liked it, the way you didn't know then your father driving off in his red pickup would be every man you'd ever love returning love. The Victim Turns Blue and it's not so bad really, is it? to be the robe of a virgin who made a savior who saved a world from wanting, not so bad to be a bruise spit out from the mouth of last night's undressed stranger, a magic marker uncapped on the living room floor of a snooty next door neighbor, a dead friend's favorite cup filled up and sipped from each morning, a broken-in pair of jeans, a perfectly stained T-shirt, to crave what you were afraid to crave and get it. [End Page 39] Secrets of an Identity Thief Never give your name. Call yourself, Gone Again or Probably. Listen to conversations around you in restaurants. They have everything to do with you, but aren't anything you can't laugh about at parties. Sell yourself short, at a discount, fifty percent off the lowest price. Bargain bin. Two for one. But never give yourself, not even once, for free. Say, No. Say, I wasn't able to. I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Every train leaving: be on it. Every love ending: cause it. Everything that's asked of you is too much. Say, Too much. Say, I used to. Say, I never wanted this. Notes Composed in a Heat Wave I realize a strange affection for my doctor because he knows too much and is happy. I'm dizzy in Manhattan and think how terrible our lives behind these walls. I saw inside once, [End Page 40] imagined brick and steel dissolved, and I could hardly stand how we carried on, stacked on top of each other, separate floors, divided into rooms, so close and yet so lonely. Nothing's real in August, heat dissolving us to body. Yesterday, I had an intimate relationship with the throat of a man on a crowded train. He smelled like soap and second chances. My doctor prescribes another pill. So much work to feel happy. I tell him I cried this morning because we die, because we are given back. He says, but not tomorrow. He says, you really should try to be kind to yourself.
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Aug 31, 2022
Jennifer Trueland 
Open Access