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Meditation on a Poem about Glass Embedded in the Scalp after a Car Accident

             “You live through all of it, the impact,
              the moment absorbed in the body”    
                     –Luke Bauerlein
The poet writes about shards,
      how his body kept them, skin

grew over and eventually released
      the bits back into the world, something

foreign and useless, and I am
      familiar with the effect, having
  
picked the itchy glass of a Nissan
      from my own elbow as a child,     

a full year after the Lincoln sped head-on
      into our lane, and it isn’t very   

different, or different at all,
      from how I wake at 3:06 AM
     
every day though it’s been
      over three years and his shadow    

still rides the length of my body
      as if it now belongs to me, how

my skin took in and grew over
      his violence and now spits it back     

out in small fragments each time
      a man stands too close on the subway.


by Jeanann Verlee

Jeanann Verlee is author of Racing Hummingbirds, recipient of the Independent Publisher Book Award Silver Medal in poetry, and Said the Manic to the Muse. She has been awarded the Third Coast Poetry Prize and the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry and her work has appeared in The New York Quarterly, Rattle, and failbetter, among others. Verlee wears polka dots and kisses Rottweilers. She believes in you. Learn more at jeanannverlee.com. 
ISSN 2157-8079
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