Abortion w/ Found Bruise
I woke up this morning and was a contusion or
pregnant so I looked for hematoma of tissue knitting
needles allowing blood to seep I tried to dilate
hemorrhage or extravasate myself bruises I picked up
his dry cleaning do not blanch got a wire hanger are
caused by internal bleeding I’m ready for my Mommie
Dearest moment at the level of the skin what gowns
I’d wear initiated by blunt trauma for you causing
damage through and each of paper compression I
counted the poisons under the sink last night small
bruises read yesterday’s Glamour are not normally
dangerous alone spent some time being a living thing
during an autopsy, bruises a body indicate the
abrasions occurred while like a swamp the individual
was alive wants to be drained shapes may correspond
with suction to the instrument of injury and whirring
it often becomes more prominent I start at one
hundred as time lapses count back may grow large
suddenly remembering the phrase different “necrotic
bowel” allowing blood to travel I think it means due to
the gravity of other forces death
Hermosa
Once, because I was in bad love, I rode to the end of Lake Michigan & back, or 60 miles.
Returning to my apartment in Hermosa, I ran a cold shower & drank 80oz of King Cobra.
That was the night of the party where the host was robbed at gun point an hour after I left, my blood gold & bubbly as champagne.
That was the night I met my new abuser. Punching my number into his phone, I spelled my name A-f-t-e-r-g-l-o-w.
Last summer, I traded my throat chakra choker for red coral from a witch to keep incubuses away.
I kept it under my pillow, but once every 10 days I texted Please fuck me to a pentagram & took 25 mg of melatonin to fall asleep.
A handsome man appeared in my dreams. His white silk like man milk. His body like a widow’s.
At the end of my closing shift at the bookstore one night, my manager’s husband cornered me with a question about his wife.
Why can’t she seem to get along with anyone?
He kept solo cups of sour wine in his file cabinets.
I felt like I couldn’t go home ever again, so I rode my brown Bayside until I reached the 6-cornered star at the intersection of Cicero & Irving Park.
The 3-storey buildings melted into 1-storey houses, pale aluminum siding in yellow or blue. The sun dipped itself into the purple cream of low clouds; The Joy of Losing Weight tinned in my earbuds.
That road is named Milwaukee because it goes northwest into Wisconsin and I thought of going all the way.
I kept going after that but I stopped reading street names.
Stephanie Lane Sutton was born in Detroit. Her writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Offing, and Rhino Poetry, among others. She is the author of the micro-chapbook Shiny Insect Sex (Bull City Press) and has a creative writing MFA from the University of Miami. She makes live interactive poetry on Twitch as @AthenaSleepsIn.