Remember, swollen lungs can drown. / I remember her drowning. / I am drowning myself as I write this.

Decamp into ramps of small intestine twists, she says. But driving alone, you’ve always avoided highways—for the fear of breeze shaving crazily at your vehicle’s chemo head, other drivers bullying your sluggishness or the spotlessness of speed guns with km bullets aiming at your windscreen's chest.

At fourteen I imagined that in the face of great tragedy, I would be brave, heroic even.

Gradually conceals / suddenly. Confiscated takes a bullet for / stolen. A whole family hiding / beneath the floorboards of language.

So what if / thoughts are things and / things are ten digit passcodes

On the coldest nights, you could hear these other lives. Broken housing contracts and paystubs-that-never-were fluttering their wings in the wind.