How to Stop What Could be Born Inside of You by Maisie Williams

Step 1: 

Look down. It isn’t. It is. View the absence. The dead space before realization. All the hands to mouths, eyes crowning, light like a holy orifice breaking open to speak what you’ve done. Look at your hands. Wonder. 

Step 2: 

Put your head in your hands. Cry. He will start the fear motions. The rapid hand movements, the intense eye contact, the picking up and putting down of paper towels. The questions. The questions. The questions. Like where does a thing go when it’s almost gone. And what do you want to do now? 

Step 3: 

Think about what to do now. All the magazine articles, feminist lectures, talks from your mother. Say to him three words like an answer: I’m just scared. 

Step 4: 

Think about calling your mother. Don’t. Think about it again as you’re putting on your socks, slowly, one by one. Consider asking her about the ride to the clinic. About the tears and her sister’s shoulder and how she thought she really loved him.  

Step 5: 

Almost leave a voicemail saying: Tell me all the ways a hand of light can reach inside of me and heal this too. 

Step 6: 

Go to the bathroom. 

Step 7: 

Walk to the car. Look over your shoulder for the cat that lives at the edge of your dorm. The one who rubs against your leg and no one else’s. She is gone. Maybe a car, a van, a sickness, a slinking into the shadows. Maybe nothing. 

Step 8: 

Go to the store. Listen through one ear to testimonial of what works and how. Make him buy it while you loiter in the candy aisle. It is some season. There is every decoration out. Watch Santa statue mingle with turkey leaning on a crisp flag.  

Step 9: 

Get out. 

Step 10: 

Decide now is the time to ask about the gone brother. The one with the name of a dead cowboy. Ask: Dead? Cowboy?  

Step 11: 

Watch his eyes glaze over like something you fish out of the pond. Wonder how much sadness can spill out into a room without being seen.  Wonder if sadness is ever just your own. 

Step 12: 

Let him drive you home. The night is dark. Your mind wanders to craft poems of spun air and small cardboard boxes. You write: The night is dark. Look down. 

Step 13: 

Eat fast food together on your bed surrounded by the glitter of a hundred half folded wrappers. A hundred shrouds. 

Step 14: 

Watch TV with him. Swallow your food. Sit with your feet in his lap and the blue light on your hands. Inside your mind you are already fumbling through the long goodbye, pressing platitudes into his cheek with your lips, the door between you, a thick shadow cutting into night. 

Step 15: 

Take the pill. It goes how pills go. Put it on your tongue. Swallow. 

Step 16: 

Feel relief start to swell inside of you like a balloon inflating. Inhale. Look up. 

Maisie Williams is not that Maisie Williams. Her poetry has been published with Rattle’s Poets Respond. She previously served on the editorial staff at Zone 3 Press. She is currently a Poetry MFA candidate at Boston University.

12 December 2024