I took scissors to the map
trying to snip out its words.
Confused the literal with the littoral—
some desert holding seas, her neck's
c divot filled with sand. Called
myself a sixfingered Fate and yet
was still a child, raveling my
fury in splintered yarn. Peeled her
nightshade body but didn't want to
boil water after removing her eyes
from the spud. Told my friends:
I'm moving on! But wonder where
I will end. Came while driving,
bored and flushed, my foot pressing
the accelerator like a shoulder. Speeding
past What Cheer and Brooklyn, Iowa—
my childhood swimming bellyup in the
heartland. It's all neat parcels, six
by six squares, like bright washcloths
I, as a girl, knit. Imagining
her diamond saw mouth split by
double highway lines. Toothless twoway traffic
and no crossovers. Everything oncoming. A
petrified deer, taxidermied on the road's
border—we all make mistakes. Piecewise,
I call myself. Incapable of solving
the math into shoreline. I see
better without glasses, before parallax shifts
roads into focus. Something about crosshairs.
Han says to turn rose quartz
into radios to broadcast good news
about this religion called coincidence. Hiding
ugly things in trim patterns. Coincidence
knows what my fingers forget: folding
her face's clay edges into a
crisp set of twelve point antlers.
