My speaker wants to make some big pronouncements, fly
with extended metaphors. She’s disgusted when I toss
the coffee grounds in the trash without even trying
to make an image. Don’t they look like loam,
the crushed beans once whole—yes, crushed and used,
the way I sometimes feel? My speaker wants to know
where the trash ultimately goes. Reminds me
about Thoreau—I can stand as remote from myself
as from another. I have long loved the way the poet
Ai’s name was pronounced “I,” but my speaker is bored—
I have written about this before. My speaker
wants me to be someone else in this poem—Dumbo
or Marilyn Monroe, or catapult back to my younger self,
a little girl wrapped in victimhood or a Superman’s cape
depending on the day. I tell my speaker the old joke
about the naive bride—First the aisle, then the altar.
Then her hymn—I’ll alter him. Hear the “I” in aisle? I ask.
But my speaker is unimpressed. Aye aye aye aye,
I am the Frito Bandito, I used to sing with my sister.
The first “aye” sounded like “I” and then
the next three sounded like they began with a “y.”
A Frito bandito robbed people of their chips
at gunpoint. He was a mascot of our youth. Back then,
we weren’t afraid of banditos or guns. They were just
cartoons. We weren’t outraged by any Mexican stereotypes
as we would be now. I could have never predicted
the gun violence so prevalent in my adulthood,
a recent mass shooting right on the beach
where I walk every day. A 15-year-old boy
who the medics thought was hit in the heart,
his left side torn open by bullets, lived. He had
a congenital condition that placed his heart
on the right side. Can there really be a feel good story
about a mass shooting? I think not. And yet
how giddy I was to hear this. I imagined
the shocked medic wondering at the magic
of this young man still breathing. Brig, a fiction student,
said I could use his image—the fluorescent light of lies.
He meant the ceilings of hospitals and the false promises
of enthusiastic doctors and nurses. He recently lost
his young wife. I, my mother. This boy will live, I told Brig.
This boy will live. The coffee bean unground, become whole
in reverse. This boy’s heart intact. I had walked
the same beach only hours early. I walk it almost every day,
my speaker wanting me to make big pronouncements—
today about violence, but most days about the dying sea.

Disappointed I wasn’t deemed a future rockstar
or supermodel, I looked at my results, having no idea
what the job description would entail. I walked
home from school on Elder Ballou Road
wishing there were sidewalks, cars winding
and whizzing as I jumped on lawns
to get out of the way. I hated the smell
of the incinerator which burned trash everyday
at 4 pm, my eyes watering. Cold Spring Park
needed more benches for the oldies and swings
for the kids. The spinner was so rusty
those who slashed their fingers wound up
getting tetanus shots. Polluted Social Pond
gave me an ear infection. Too many bars.
Too many donut shops. We needed a book store!
An art movie house! What were we going to do
with all those empty textile mills, their cold
smokestacks and brick facades?

                              Now I’m meeting

with other industry experts to work it all out.

I thought I was prepared. Neil even had DEET, but I must have sprayed unevenly. Soon I sported red splotches like an ankle monitor telling me stay home and grieve. I scratched through the night, annoyed by death. I used cortisone cream on the outside, my own cortisol pumping inside as I thought of everything I needed to do besides feel sad. I broke my home confinement—groceries, new tires (I had a flat on the way home!), a doctor’s appointment, work, and meetings at work. It was easier to itch than cry.

What did that dead tire mean? No air to save it, even my spare donut flat. My legs prickled, and there was a big bite on my shoulder blade I needed a backscratcher to reach. I was stoic as we gathered and read the poems of my dear, dead friend. I was stoic and perhaps a little numb. I was unflappable with the AAA guy, holding my phone flashlight in the dark as he jacked up my car. He said I was unusually calm for a woman who’d broken down. The tire meant stop moving. The stinging began.