Lizzy Burnam 🐞

The morning after your suicide
you peel your body’s edges down like string cheese 
and find your dead heart suspended 
in thin air, folded up tight like a paper crane. 

The discovery lights a candle 
in the empty pantry of your brain. 
You remember something true, something 
you knew since before you were born, 
although there’s not a word for it, 
not a poem that could contain it, 
just a heavy, flapping feeling like a tongue 
lapping at the skin behind your knees. 

You tell the doctors you think you’re sane 
again and they believe you. 
They return your blood in a zip-locked bag
and then release you. 

The road home is paved 
with postage stamps and acorns, 
bottle caps and coupons, 
mud puddles and maybe-laters.

When you find the time, you pick it up 
and put in your pocket like a dirty coin. 
You call it your cravings account. 
You attach each tick of the clock 
to a lick of that gnawing, hungry feeling.

Only the dead don’t eat, you remind yourself. 
You grow a second set of teeth. 
You stare into each sharp fang as if it were a mirror. 

You write the squirrels. You drink your money. 
You take giant, gulping hops from season to season, 
but still the gangrene creeps like mold 
from your untwitching toes to your shoulders. 

You dig yourself a mote with logic and reason. 
You fill it with a stream of stale whys 
and stoic hows and stuttering whens. 
You fall in and nearly drown, but find the surface
scribbled on a scrap of algae in your mouth: 
The spark comes not from the thirst alone,
but from the friction in the chasing. 

You build a fortress of desire and set it aflame. 
The fire eats through your paper heart in seconds, 
but the crane rises from the ash 
with bigger, beating wings again and again. 
The coins from your time bank melt in the heat. 

Your crane-heart, now shock-white and hard as clay, 
begins to speak 
in a language you recognize like a dream: 
A bridge, a stone, a book, a lake. 

You inhale, you remember your name, you jolt awake.