— unpredictable thoughts

Mak­ing a Fist

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life slid­ing out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watch­ing palm trees swirl a sick­en­ing pat­tern past the glass.
My stom­ach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

“How do you know if you are going to die?“
I begged my mother.
We had been trav­el­ing for days.
With strange con­fi­dence she answered,
“When you can no longer make a fist.”

Years later I smile to think of that jour­ney,
the bor­ders we must cross sep­a­rately,
stamped with our unan­swer­able woes.
I who did not die, who am still liv­ing,
still lying in the back­seat behind all my ques­tions,
clench­ing and open­ing one small hand.