The hottest summer on record I couldn’t open the windows.
A stranger had sent flowers to my house with a note that read say thank you.
I walked from my car to my door like a snake oxbows

across the sandy road from dune to dune. Balanced a colander
full of silver spoons, a saucer of cat’s eyes, a matchbook
spreading a mouse trap’s jaw, a potted conifer

I trimmed with scissors made for a doll on the sill
so I would wake if someone broke the feeble lock.
I’ve always been a deep sleeper, though. Roused for a fire drill,

a meteor shower, a planet’s burning thumbprint hanging
on the earth’s lip, I would wrap myself in a quilt, tiptoe
to the telescope, stare, wonder, remember nothing on waking.

I had recently learned that I wanted to live, when, in a Kentucky
backstreet, a Nazi leveled his gun at me out the window of the passing motorcade.
I was behind a pony wall, before I even thought, balled up my body—

beetle dumbly stumbling in a magnolia’s bloom. Another protestor stood in the road
and shouted what are you going to do, shoot me? Oh animal
of me, oh lungfish, oh roach, oh pigeon. My body not the horse I rode

in on, but the horse that I am—It was a surprise—I had always been
a blue shred of meat hung between molars, the flashing microwave clock
after an outage, a condom ripped and caught in innards, the shattered screen

of a burner phone. I did not know what to do with this new desire
to stay on earth. The stranger’s messages had become more urgent:
Smile, beautiful. You’d be a lot prettier. Smile, you bitch. Smile,

or else. It wasn’t so simple when I couldn’t see the gun.
Awake all night, yellowing a silhouette on my mattress in sweat
I thought about throwing open the window, getting it over and done.

Globs of hydrangeas, spittle of baby’s breath, the rancid stink
of a blackening leaf pressed in the bouquet’s center.
I bent to sniff them, retching over the sink

until I was spent. What is it in me that makes me smell
what I know to be rotten? Desire forms a fist inside me.
The impatient sea of one hand staves the other’s diving bell.