I mistake it for a night crawler, which recalls my father forcing one into jumpy nine-year-old palms so that I can ruche its long succulence onto a hook. But this one, the color of giblets, spans two checkerboard tiles and looks stunned, as I am: How’d I end up here? A whiplash tongue tastes the air. No Brother Francis, I swallow fear and loathing, seize Tupperware, and then, stifling dry heaves (En garde!) poise  bin over reptile—which thrashes into spitfire life, sidewinding into the living room, all snap and writhe. A montage of past insults replays the Why me? refrain: A bat’s webby crepe sonars over our canopy bed, five baby mice erupt from stove burner coils—how dare the creatures belie the trusty idiom “safe as houses”—each scene increasing the horror, urging murder (weight trap with soup pot, toss corpse in the morning). Outside, in the generous dark, sweaty hands press panic against plastic. Then open. Set the self free.

And re-envision those lungs
as maps, the self’s inner atlas:
one hundred routes
funneling
into branch lines,
cloverleafs,
cul de sacs.
Or call them dual panniers
flanking a breastbone,
one plump koi, kissing a mirror,
all lips and flared silk.
Wild as papyrus,
a Psalter. A Rorschach. A centerfold.

Newly un-boned as a cat,
inhabit that next inhale, feeling
how spacious a backbone can be,
freeing shoulders to roll,
the head to loll
and lift, floating into place, the body
aligned, alight, a home for the holy.

These days, she drinks light,
shelves those costly oils,
her sable brush, the palette’s whorls—azure,
cobalt, cyanine—sky piece hues,
left to clot. Since the surgery,
she cannot bear time vanishing, stroke
by stroke. She lives to swim
through twilight’s milk, to echo
birds on high, larking away,
to chew the new-picked April
clover stem, four-leafed or not.
She will not mourn her lost breasts,
nor scenes she’ll never paint—finally
here, as is. Now.