A few months before the crash
you slid chicken skin down the vegetable shoot.

How you get here, girl? She ran

two boyfriends: Hunter & Chase, so you know
I’ve got a Remington RP in the nightstand

& you asked to borrow the hairdryer. Till then, the closest
you’d come to technologies of death

were your father’s hands / mother’s neck. Each night we watched

Naked & Afraid, hot stuck in the mouth. Peeled
Kraft White Singles, Airheads in blue

raspberry sour, Snap’d
Butterfingers, as the screen gleaned her iris

ordering dumbbells off Amazon.

That year you proposed: difficulty as a means
to unhinge grief. When Spring broke

you split & went down the Keys, sucking the green
from two root canals. The way sugar turns

to acid in the mouth. Men outside IHOP said

they’d have to paper-bag your head
to stop themselves.