Body, Car, Water

I am in the backseat of a station wagon,

and I feel like a crime scene about to happen,

like tender skin, you can already feel the bruises rising from,

like a flock of birds who know when it’s time to come home.

I can hear them rolling out the yellow tape,

it is Death’s variation of teenagers scratching into tree trunks and walls

to say, “I was here.”

The car walls stiffen with the click of the car keys like a belt going up a notch

and the air feels thinner

like I could poke it like a paper with a wooden pencil and enter another dimension,

even the slit leather beneath my body tenses

like a quivering muscle before an immunization shot,

full of unaccommodating anticipation.

The car walls nudge in closer and folds itself away into a corner

like a vagrant dog

who hides under the back deck when it knows it’s about to die.

It feels like origami, a swan,

an origami paper swan.

I hear the officer say “DOA” just as a floppy-haired intern shows up late,

just in time for him to ask what it means,

“dead on arrival”, we both say.

I have the familiar and disturbing sensation of wet socks,

then wet jeans,

and I see why the car chose a swan of all things to be,

water sprouts up from the car floor from some unsung genesis,

like a weed between the cracks of an airport runway.

I hear the body bag zipping, I hear them calling you in to identify the body.

Car water sloshes against my chest,

like a little-too-friendly-guy shoving me up against a locker,

car water slides it’s hand up my thigh,

I thrash my fists against the windows

like chunks of ice clapping against the glass of a well-poured drink;

car water undoes my bra with one hand and gropes my breast with the other,

car water’s hand reaches up over my mouth,

the other pulls back on my hair and staring at the bare expanse of my neck,

he sneaks a smile.

I look outside for the moon, for the moon like a mother

to keep me safe,

but instead I only see his smirk,

tightlipped and grinning, his face a putrid yellow, he laughs,

he scoffs

at body trapped, body ravaged, body drowning.

Body water surges up from my stomach,

scaling the ridges of my throat with an easiness I find insulting

as car water simultaneously swarms down my tongue

to meet the body water that has been drowning me for years.

They shake hands at my trachea,

share divergent bacteria and similar homicidal thoughts,

they take a moment to order a latte and mull over their desires to drown me

and body water commends car water’s initiative on going forward

and they decide to go forth as one to finish me off.

My ears roar, body’s final origami swan song,

so I tear my eyes away from the car ceiling

even if it tears breath away too,

so that I may frantically search for the sky through the car window,

for anything wholesome to grasp ahold of,

for one last look at my mother, the moon, her safety.

But I only see your face,

a yellow sneering moon, that grins as the

water strangles, squeezes, and shakes me like a baby that wouldn’t stop crying

and you were too fucked up to know what else to do,

A yellow sneering moon that snickers in my face with its coffee breath,

its greyish beard hairs that scratch my cheeks like flies that throng a corroded corpse,

the hairs, the coffee breath, it drowns me in its own way different from the water,

and the face, it demands from my last departing breath,

as it unbuttons my pants,

to call him by his name: daddy.

-anna sluder