ManicDDaily

Containing It

The whole way down the subway steps she thinks of cutting herself.

As she mounts the train,  she feels
flesh at her knuckles, the arm of an older black woman
pressed against her, her dark skin as cool and sweet and ineffably
unexpectedly soft as a cloud.

Still her mind finds out the fine lines
it imagines peeling back from her wrist or throat
like the cover
of an opening book.

Swaying with the crowd, she tries to force consciousness elsewhere.
How much she’d like some tea.  Strong.  Milky.
Except that maybe it’s all the tea that’s the problem; some chemical reaction–
Still she wants it.

Depression is the anger turned inward.
Just tell yourself you’re mad at him.
Just say that you do too blame him.

She wants the tea so much she can almost taste it,
only the tea leaves in her mind brew a briny
greyed puddle.  She pictures the puddle in the country,
beneath a willow, behind a hedge, in the shadow of a stone wall.
It is a place that never gets much sun, a small triangle at quarter to noon.
The wall is made of hundreds of stones
joined simply by corresponding shape,
the weight of each other’s gravity,
a long time together.

Too bright outside.  She steps around a man made of angles, his elbows knobs,
orange plastic cup for change, grey stubble, and next to him,
a smooth coffee-colored guy pushing a wire cart around the
sidewalk’s gutted pools.  “Gillette,” he shouts.  “Schick, Remington—”

She keeps her eyes down, keeps
walking, but she hears in the hawked
brand names the reflection of the men, the silvered packages,
the stacked blades.

Maybe if she just buys some.
Not to use.
To stare down at
in the dark rumple of paper bag.

It will be a dry brown bag, its lip folded and re-folded
until, finally, it assumes the softness
of flesh.

She imagines herself looking inside the bag repeatedly, hiding it,
unhiding it, curling it vaguely closed, uncurling
it into a weighted vacuity.

But maybe it will help.
To just buy some.
To look at only,
to look at in a soft brown bag.

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This is not autobiographical!  It is the revision of an older piece, which I am posting for dVerse Poet Pubs Poetics prompt on temptation, hosted by Mary Kling.   I’ve been taking a bit of a blogging break to work on larger projects–though mainly I find myself catching up on a great deal of practical things.  I am getting ready to really work on the big projects soon!  (Ha.)