2011 Issue - Santa Fe Community College

in the leather chair-arms. She’d say, (to us or them):
“I don’t know why you all don’t just go home.”
Once her psychiatrist gave her an exact suicide recipe.
She didn’t do it. She fell, dropped her keys in a snowdrift
by the front door and said to the friend who found her
four hours later, “Don’t know if I should thank you or curse you.”
Frostbite nearly cost her a leg below the knee.
She said, “Freezing to death hurts,” as if this surprised her,
as if numbness ought to sweetly take over.
Maybe she meant it hurts to come back to life.
One year, the Folk Art Museum closed for renovations.
Her pharmacist was arrested so she had to give up opium.
She lost her driver’s license, and the woman who brought her
a green chile chicken casserole every week stopped coming.
The last time I saw her she was wide eyed
but tight-lipped, watching sparrows chip
and scatter birdseed from the feeder.
The skin on her face had sunk flat against the skull.
She would not speak to us.
The birds were busy; it was spring,
and the daffodils began to unfold at the last moment.
She wasn’t waiting for anyone to get there before she died.
Santa Fe Literary Review 25