I fell on an incline, talus, tibia, fibula, calcaneal tendon mangled,
red circuits ruptured, body facing east toward a little town named
Climax and then New York where I once danced in a circle of girls
at K’s sister’s wedding, broom, shattered glass, him in his parents’
bathroom pilfering benzos from the medicine chest and now his
grave, lonely in sunlight in Sag Harbor, my leg twisted west toward
the lake, sunset, San Francisco where Mikel covered in KS lesions
with his last $50 took me in a cab to see the Conservatory of Flowers,
actually only the zinnias, just look he said, a yellow that made my eyes
ache but nothing thus far compares to bone pain except childbirth,
put a bullet, I begged my ex-husband in the forty-eighth hour of labor,
right here, pointing to my temple, leg inert in a black cast for months,
dead grandma’s wheelchair, son by then a junkie, blank and mean,
I crawled to the cold road pleading for help, humbled yet, queen?