Content warnings: suicide, gun violence, blood
When you rip a lower jaw from an upper jaw,
The lower jaw dies
Strings of fate and muscle dangle cut between them
The upper jaw survives, keeps living, grinning, living and grinning
Bottom jaw, bloody toothed, flops lifeless. Flops dead. Bottom jaw becomes
a ghost, a body, a past-tense thing
Now think about ghosts
picture life repeating in a littler loop,
caught in perpetual orbit around the same horrible moment,
an anachronism reliving that amber-stuck-bug of disaster.
Trauma inhabits a body the way a ghost inhabits a home
The woman in the emerald dress
holds her dainty and feminine gun
in her dainty and feminine hand
pointed it at her dainty and feminine head.
(So many people put the gun in their mouths.
They blow their jaws off instead of their brains out.
They live to drool about it.)
Her blood is a stain on floorboards long since rotted and replaced
She has outlasted the floorboards, outlasted her own blood,
Her emerald dress eternally shimmers the way it did that day,
the ivory on her revolver’s handle always boasts the same elephant memory
This time will be different
This time she’ll make the right choice
This time she’ll put the gun against her temple
She won’t put it in her mouth.
Asa Delaney (Homo sapiens domestica) is a writer and editor endemic to the northeastern United States. This reclusive, multilingual herbivore is most notable for its interest in animal behavior and does well in captivity when paired with cats, dogs, or other companion animals. More information can be found @UnlikelyAsa on Bluesky or Instagram.
Photo by Erik Müller on Unsplash
