When I glanced down and saw my body, 
the suffering, damaged girl. 

My beloved, nowhere to be found, 
had died on impact. 

Now the ER doctors say I can go either way. 

So I hover on the Sistine ceiling 
of the I.C.U., undecided, my dead lover’s 
hand reaching for me 
like God stretched for Adam. 

The tubes and machines that keep me 
earthbound give way. 

We soar past the hospital morgue, 
backtrack the highway, our bodies 
unbroken, the crash spliced out. 

My mother keens beside my hospital bed, 
her fingers tangled in my blood-soaked hair, 
picking at pieces of windshield. 
Holding tight. 

Years later I re-trace the road 
between death and Santa Barbara, 
how he cradled my head in his lap as he drove. 

How he didn’t want to go with me. 
How I always got what I wanted. 

All my life, such a greedy girl. 

Author’s Note: When I was twenty, a highway collision killed my fiancé and my unborn child. I survived only because I was asleep, my head on my fiancé’s lap, when the driver of the other vehicle veered into our lane and crashed into us at 70 mph. I have tried for years to write about the immediate aftermath. This poem is the first time I got it right.

Publisher’s Note:

In the upper right corner of this content column, the [R] in the word count refers to reprinted, aka re-curated work. This poem with author’s note first appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry (April 2017), was reprinted in Rhone Fancher’s collection Enter Here (KYSO Flash Press, 2017), and is re-curated here with her permission.

Bio: Alexis Rhone Fancher