\
I am born feet first,
And I choke on my mother's blood.
I am born at the tip of a knife,
And my little hand won't let go.
I am born with pieces of me,
Missing, carved out of my body
Like a fat little Halloween pumpkin.
\\
My father drops me on the linoleum floor.
My mother rolls on top of me in her sleep.
King Solomon threatens to cut me in half,
And his deep baritone voice sounds to me
More like a promise I know he will not keep.
\\\
I am bitten by the neighbor's dog.
I choke on my first honey-nut cheerio.
I drown face down in a three-inch deep bath.
I sit in a locked car on a hot summer day.
How easy it is to forget something so small,
When it cannot yet remember for itself.
Notice I am an it in this sentence,
These are my assigned pronouns.
Children should be seen. Not heard.
When I talk too much in my car seat,
My mother tells me even a kidnapper
Would be so annoyed they'd return me.
She was all I knew, so I believed her.
\\\\
I learn to walk, and I fall down the stairs.
I learn to read, and I tell my father
That pink or purple are my favorite colors.
I learn to speak, and I talk with a lisp
That sounds just a little too faggot-y.
My parents bring me to the church,
And the preacher baptizes me over and over,
Until I cannot tell where my tears end,
And the warm waters of the baptismal begin.
\\\\
I do not look both ways before crossing the street.
\\\\ \
I play in puddles in the middle of a thunderstorm.
I feared neither the wrath of angry gods
Nor the slow accumulation of electrons at my feet.
\\\\ \\
I eat an apple and accidentally swallow the seeds.
For the next three days, I am inconsolable,
I believe I will die from cyanide poison.
It will happen soon. Any minute now.
\\\\ \\\
I eat an apple and accidentally swallow the seeds.
For the next three months, I am inconsolable,
I believe my father's words:
A tree will take root in my stomach
The trunk will burst out of my young chest.
It will happen soon. Any day now.
\\\\ \\\\
My mother makes a quick trip to the grocer,
And our house burns down with me inside it.
\\\\ \\\\
We go to the beach. We go to the waterpark.
I swim too far from shore. I swim in the wave pool.
I choke on salt water. I choke on chlorine.
But I do not drown. I awaken on an uncharted island,
I make a volleyball into my best friend.
I offer a pig's head to appease the beast.
I save a man from cannibals and name him Friday.
I send my parents a postcard. They do not reply.
\\\\ \\\\ \
I am abducted by a man in a white van.
He forces me to answer survey questions.
He makes me listen to his podcast.
He feeds me candy instead of vegetables.
But I talk too much. I am an annoying child.
I have opinions. I have wants and needs.
As my parents promised, he returns to the park
And kicks me out of his van, never to return.
\\\\ \\\\ \\
My mother makes a quick stop at the park
To release the pet ducks we adopted at Easter.
She tells me to stay in the car,
But I cannot resist the urge to climb the gnarled oaks.
She is miles and miles away before she realizes
That I am not sitting quietly in the back seat.
I begin to understand the power of silence.
\\\\ \\\\ \\\
I get COVID and choke on my own lungs.
I lose my sense of smell, my sense of taste.
My tongue and my lips have long gone unused.
\\\\ \\\\ \\\\
I kneel in a school stairwell my head
In the warm arms of a live shooter drill.
The teacher hands out the jolly ranchers
She normally saves for only the best children,
And she hands them out to all of us,
Even the children who talk too much.
(I am no longer one of these children.)
She does this every time we kneel by the wall,
Teaching us a lesson she wished she learned:
Statistical deaths are inevitable. Embrace them.
\\\\ \\\\ \\\\
I kneel in a school stairwell my head
In the cold arms of a tornado drill.
I can feel the roar of the wind in my bones, in the stones,
And I finally understand the wrath of angry gods
And the kings who claim to be chosen by them
And the fear in my father's eyes when he baptized me.
It is not the slow accumulation of electrons in my feet,
It is the way the warm wind's gentle hand presses
The cold air down upon us until we feel the chill
First in the roots of our teeth and then in our fingernails.
I will never feel the caress of the wind
Or hear the sound of the train at night
Without remembering the violence
That hide in a grown man's palm
When he curls his fingers into a fist.
\\\\ \\\\ \\\\ \
I am struck by lightning because I did not listen to my father.
\\\\ \\\\ \\\\ \\
I get lost on the wrong side of town at night.
When I try to ask a police officer for help,
He shoots me six times in the chest.
He is given a month of paid time off per bullet.
My corpse is tried as an adult.

CS Crowe is a storyteller from the Southeastern United States with a love of nature and a passion for writing. He believes stories and poems are about getting there, not being there, and he enjoys those tales that take their time getting to the point.
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