Accident Prone by Alison Powell

1. In order to get ready to sleep, I used to have to cross my pinky toe over my other toe, on each side, rubbing my foot against the shin of the other leg. This action told my body I was folded up and ready for sleep, as when a dog makes its rounds before settling down. This habit of folding and constraint has held me over my life. As a child I would nestle into the top shelf of the linen closet, or close myself into the old, leather trunk in my room like I was treasure, burying myself, to be found by who— my mother, I suppose, who might open the lid and pretend to be surprised. Or under beds, and in trees, and inside cupboards— my brother, too, once hid inside a cupboard on Easter, said he saw the large white foot of the Easter bunny plodding through the living room. To fold is not to break. It is to pretend to be smaller, more even, harder to spot. 

2. Infants need to be tightly swaddled. We went through many sleep sacks, so many Houdini costumes, with our daughter. She had to be wrapped, tightened, and wrapped again, in a constant vigilance against the startle reflex, the doctors called it, which seemed so awful—the way the infant would wake, arms and legs flailing, with a feeling of falling. Now that they were out of the womb, in our world of oxygen and gravity, it felt like just being alive was to plummet. Once, in the middle of the night, I awoke to feed my daughter and fell into the white crib, smashing my eye into a blue-black bloom.

3. I break; I do not take ill. My friend, a poet and psychoanalyst, calls me with complaints: diverticulitis, sensitivities, rashes. I can hear in her voice the glimmer of a minor shame, and I tease her— my Victorian Jessica, let us bring you your fainting couch! My physicality in the world is more solid stuff: a mosaic made of broken tiles, shimmering and dangerous.

4. The gray plastic cover of the sun visor mirror broke off while I was at a stoplight on my way to school. After I arrived, I broke bread in the car, a baguette I’d bought minutes before. Then I came down the hallway, weak-kneed and shaky, and broke my thirst: standing at the gray water fountain, I had, suddenly, the image of myself as an animal— a deer, maybe— lapping up the lake water. I thought: No wonder my eyes have been so dry. Have I drunk water all day? Maybe not. I’d woken early, made coffee, got the kids off to school, and the day kept unfurling like a fast ribbon. The water was not even delicious. But it saved me.

5. Of course, marriage is also a way to fold yourself into all kinds of contortions. Think of the glass blowers in Venice: the heat of the glass, the liquid stretching into the shapes of a tree, or animal, or building. With enough heat, you can become anything. But the air wants equilibrium, and returns you to a stiffer self. At the end of my favorite book as a child, a book I loved more than my dolls, there is a refrain: perhaps, kind sir, but can you sing? A tomcat pulls a mouse roughly out of the water by the scruff of her neck, the ruffles of her wedding dress dripping dew— and then he eats her, making an unexpected lunch out of his new bride.

6. I am accident prone, you might say. This would be all right, except now I am often carrying a child, and must keep myself upright. Look at this bruise. And this, the cut draped over my knee shaped like a half moon. Sometimes I know what it was that rent me, tore me up; sometimes I don’t. Once I jammed a knife into the flesh of my thumb, hard, thinking it was a carrot (I was making stew). I still remember the stained sink in the ER, how I bled into it. Every day of the year I am torn somewhere: a peeling at the cuticle, a slice from who knows where, another cut from the sheer wildness of this life.

7. I have a scar on my left cheek from when my son scratched me. He is made of heat, he is made of glass, my little heart. The scar floats like a white feather there. He broke both arms before he was four; one of them in several places. They re-set it while he was under anesthesia and when he was returned to us on the hospital gurney he was floating. I held his gaze, his eyes whirling around, and tried to tell him telepathically: I cannot keep you from yourself, my life-long love.

8. I never promised to take care of my mother, and she never promised to take care of me. When I held my near-translucent infant in my arms, she wasn’t there. For year, my son had a stork’s kiss, a red smattering mark on his forehead, until it faded in that way of birthmarks, as his sister’s did, one at the back of her neck and one at the base of her head. Like this the receipts of infancy lift, or else go deeper into the body where they move like clouds. Like the receipts of a mother’s love, or the withholding of it. Heartbreak hotel.

9. When you are a smoker and you try to give it up, you must let many other, associated things go— it is not a solo habit but a complex of things: drinking wine, drinking coffee, working, taking breaks, having sex, talking. How having a cigarette in the alley was a way to break the ice. My mother and me, sitting on the back deck surrounded by woods, sharing a Marlboro Light. When I tried to give up smoking, my body was like a string wound too tightly. I felt like I’d been driving on the highway for miles, and I was thirsty and almost out of gas. There were no lights, no stations for miles.

10. So many car accidents. One: I crossed the highway at a red light, thinking it was flashing but it wasn’t, just my head was somewhere else. It was inside a poem. A woman driving a van broke her wrist. Our cars spun, the little crusty blocks of glass rained around me. But I broke none of my bones, only crushed my father’s car, which crumpled like a napkin.

11. When I was a child, my mother would bemoan how sensitive I was to noise, how easily overwhelmed. Now a mother, I keep by my bed a small striped glass box. The bottom is mirrored and inside are many clear silicone ear plugs. Many mornings I put these in and walk around the house wearing them. I put myself underwater. I fold myself in.

12. Children often draw bodies like this: a giant head, round like the moon, arms sprouting from where ears should be, and legs extending from below the chin like two toothpicks angled out of an olive.

13. When my mother described the myth of Athena breaking out of Zeus’s forehead, the arrogance of that direct birth from the God soul, my father would point to his own receding hairline, the black hair, and roll his blue eyes and smile. He called me little mouse, though I was neither shy, nor quiet, and didn’t take bites of things in little bits. My father loved Darwin, the dark win being for him the end of the holy. He’d hated his priests.

14. When a poet breaks form, they are also pointing to form; they are backing away from it. Sometimes slowly, sometimes at breakneck speed. They are saying— see — I see you— olly olly oxen free…. As I break from my marriage, I am pointing to form. I intend only to bend into a new shape. Few want to think of this way. Most can only understand it as a tragedy. But it isn’t a tragedy, it is a drama. Husband was Book Two. A good man, with skin the color of almonds and a funny dance. Book Three: we’ve broken this union. Here’s a new man, unfathomable, and a new woman. Now that we are separate, I see my husband across the field like a point on a map, a lucky break.

15. We tried for years to break my husband of the habit of gnawing his nails, twisting his beard. The woman at the opera tapped him and said sharply, Please, I can’t focus. For years I carried her in my pocket, that irritable woman. For my part, I tried to break the habit of apologizing; I wanted to show my face and my agency. But I can’t remember a resolution I didn’t break, so I stopped making them. I’m sorry, not sorry. Sorry again.

16. My son tumbled down the stairs after standing at the top of the flight backwards with his head between his legs. We went to the hospital straightaway. It was New Years’ Day. My child then breakdanced, bloodied, through the next seven years: two broken windows, holes in the wall, toys pulled apart, dishes, all the hearts broken in our house, hours of broken sleep. He was like a Swiss army knife— all arms and legs, knees and elbows jamming into me. Here is a photo of me with my face in a grimace, my son grinning maniacally, having just body-slammed me to the ground.

17. I am always in two places at once, a master of bilocation. I’m here, but I’m not. I’m listening and getting ready to speak. It is hard for me not to break into another person’s sentence because I get so excited, so carried away. I’m not writing this while you read it; even as I type these words, I’m rubbing the belly of my dog, and thinking of the museum exhibit. Or I’m a bit asleep, in a little part of me. I fell on the tent stake, I split open my eye and they stitched me up again. The car crumpled like a soda can, I cut my lip on the edge of it. I crawled out the window of my childhood home and lay my body flat on the shingles. You do not know what it is to be bored until you have been me being bored, restless, like a dog in a shelter cage, waiting to go home—- to what? Some place with a pond.

18. My aunt, my brother, my mother, and myself have all come to understand that one part of our body—some ligament, muscle—is not quite long enough. It doesn’t stretch the way it should. As a result, we suffer from particular ailments—sciatica, stiff necks. Our bodies tighten up on the left or right side like a violin string wound too tightly, and must be stretched out, and coaxed back into shape. The pigeon pose is the best for this. In yoga I watch my mother and my aunt and myself do this stretch, one leg folded under the other, leaning forward to get flat on the floor. I remember doing this pose and feeling This, this is nirvana, and being told this was where we let go of the past. All of us have these longish torqued necks, like Alice peering above the treetops, like an egret flying in a storm.

19. Years ago, there, in the Brooklyn apartment, alone: the orgasm, then the water breaking, I stood, it was all over the floor, a whole towel I needed. I called my husband and he took the subway home, drew the bath, made the pasta, lit the candles. What did we know, what did we know, of love’s austere and lonely offices?
20. Once in high school, walking across the street, I was hit by a car. Right in the lower abdomen. I flew above it, somersaulting into the air, and landed on the curb with my head. The EMT cut my jeans off me while I lay motionless on the rain-slicked pavement and my friends stared. But even then, I broke nothing; I ended up more or less the same. For years I felt like disjointed clown, or a disaster, a woman in need of a container. But then I came to see: I have a saint, the saint of accident, and my bones are hinged to hers. We’re folded together, her and me: a weird set, always on the precipice of a fall.

Alison Powell is a poet and essayist whose work has recently appeared in Boulevard, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere; she is the author of Boats in the Attic (Fordham University Press, 2002) and The Art of Perpetuation (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). Powell is Associate Teaching Professor of Creative Writing at Rutgers University.

16 April 2026