A Clock Shaped Like the Solar System

That winter I watched every episode of Law & Order SVU and wept on plush animals, dyed my hair yellow like one of those harvest moons that crept too close. Refrigerated doom. I mistakenly loved a man who loved being liked, at best. In September, no hemorrhage of ironweed in fields. Odd aches. A swift jarring sunset, unscrewed and captureless. My mother called in October to say she'd dreamt I was

pregnant. By then, I'd tried papaya, parsley, garlic tea, whiskey tonic. I was calling clinics, making appointments. Taking the CAT bus. A nurse in lilac gloves and a speculum inserted and unbolted that pink arcade, quick. My mother once miscarried, bled. At seven, I saw her like an X on the cot. It was one of those episodes, unexplained collapse. Seventeen years later, the doctor ironed through my openings. And afterwards, I vomited out my spout, man,

I was a plague upon myself. Public toilet, pubic landscape, this man I loved flipped off a protestor with his 7-11 coffee cup, yelled, "Cunt." It was love of the idea of love that delivered me there. I bled claret, iron on lavatory tiles, they said I was "psychosomatic," a bit undone. I vacuumed dusk and pinned back morning. Cranked up the moon and dropped fumes, those tiny sacks of dust. Sunflower gristle, fried to the bed. I never wanted my mother

more. The ultrasound like a sex. Fleabane, goldenrod rusted shut. I was a mother in a girl's gunnysack, an exhaled balloon sent up-current alone, into no man's land, a fugue. I could only seek myself, and that armoire was empty, cracked. Those breasts and hips got unruly, cursive, brute. He said, "Knockers, titties." He was giddy. Paid for nothing. I hid by going inside out. Off-brand orrery and all that was left were nerves, fuchsia, and trash bags full of unanticipated plush. Iron

taste in my mouth long after the sleeping pills left. I watched SVU, relied on the irony of Olivia Benson opening a door we all know leads to a body. I called my mother once to say that scientists were genetically engineering unsleep. We listed pros and cons, wished each other luck. She loved my ambitions, was tricked. I was a handful of man-made mistakes. Eyelids awake. There is a knock on the door. Someone is dead. Or there is a knock on the door and someone answers, alive. Then, in one of those honking cabs below, someone is dead. In this way, you are always surprised at those unexpected hits. "You women are like sewers," this man I loved explained. I ironed his waiter shirts and took my medicine on time. Detective Stabler said, "The perp was lurking under our noses." I was too afraid to take so I gave out, gave in, like lungs. Moths flapping at lamps, trucks lush with street rain, gutter. I healed like a sunset. A man I loved walked free in Texas. I became a girl again, who never trusts and

unsleeps with the t.v. fluttering and fussing about. The perps line up: grainy, bearded, and no one can tell them apart. I am shaven rainforest, tits and electric gaps. My mother grooms the forsythia, ties up peonies in the Pennsylvania heat. She asks if I've got a man.