She read somewhere that evil isn’t real,
like shadows that exist because a shape
has blocked the light. No matter what you feel,
it’s just an absence that you can’t escape.
If this is true, then hope would make her sink.
She fears that she will float away. Instead
she grips a fifth of whiskey, takes a drink,
and lets the water break over her head.
What’s nothing multiplied? More of the same.
Her fingers shake; her face is growing numb.
If nothing happened, then no one’s to blame,
although she doesn’t know what she’ll become:
Since something isn’t right; since something’s there—
sunk deep beneath her chest, her heart, her lungs.
She thinks it’s growing, and it breathes the air,
a something without eyes and many tongues.
Her skin erupts in scales like fine-meshed lace;
the scars along her arms turn into gills,
and in an instant, it reveals its grace:
that nothing always changes what it fills.