Her Life in Flashback

Bethany Reid

Starlings count blades of grass, scatter
as the fire hydrant

breaks under the car’s force, a pond
pushing its tendrils across the highway,

a child on a schoolbus, she climbs
over the seatback, tooth

and nail, wrestling
and slugging until he says “Uncle,”

reduced to black and white,
fifteen, thumbs in her beltloops,

suspicion of tobacco under her lip—
let old people die in their beds,

when she heard death’s rattle,
she got her car keys and left the house,

beside the wrecked hydrant,
stepped through spreading water

into traffic, her fists clenched,
shocking death into taking her

right then and there, the sun
just chinning the bar of a red horizon,

starlings lifting around her
in their glittering, startled flight.

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