Stillness and breathing are simple in this pillow
of salt. Here choices don't exist — a lullaby.
Isn't this what you want too, a space as white

as quiet? A world with no newborns, no hands 
to toss them? You envy me, because you too 
have felt the needy straight pin begshine 

your eyeball to be its seam, felt the hunger 
of the gigglesigh that escapes your cupped 
hand as the funeral processes by. Which is why

you lock the cellar door between the rat poison 
and your tongue, safebury the key beneath 
the begonias; why you board up head-sized windowpanes, 

why you subjectchange about what you're really
dreamthinking on the old bridge, as you watch 
your spittle greet the drowned rocks—

which is why, hugwrapping yourself
around the rail, you smash your chin to the metal—
the reason you are cotton. At the edge of Gomorrah,

your bus fare forgottensings down the sidewalk 
when the windowless, jagged van herklurches 
and your thumb leapflies toward the driver;  

and when it happens to you, which of course it will—
and your hand scrapefires out of your husband's 
and his faceforward yell is blanketfogged 

and your feet quicksand to the ground—
in the inchspace between being stolen and letting go,
just over your left shoulder, it will be there—

the whisperitch that you familyknow,
which is you, quickening. Here, just a tiny pulse
behind you. Listen.

Isn't this why you were born with a neck?