Issue 15 • Fall 2005 • Poetry

The Accident

Gina Abelkop

I wanted something specific:
A face like a remedy, please which is
something to be swallowed,
which is in your gut. There's no

getting out what's miles deep,
no drawing back your fist
like a terrific rusty crane please
to scoop out raw from your intestine,

which is just below
the muscle, which is just below
the skin, but --
I didn't mean to put this furious

viciousness inside you. Somehow I leaked
into you, made a vessel of your veins
to carry my foul distress, passed it
from some breach in my body please

to some breach in yours. Like me, you must
become resigned to it. Let it settle like sand
and weight your bones. With your forehead
sweaty, hoping you will make it, please

that this remedy will take: I can't
stand pathetic things. I might
hover at your side please but it will
make me retch. Slick and bitter

tasting flesh please someone else once
asked me to swallow. Panic consumes me
in staccato pulses please please please
while I watch you heave, my history

setting in as fever and burning through
your lungs. Making it hard to breathe,
making you labor over living. I start
to shove fingers inside you, pleasepleaseplease

one by one, two by two, hoping
to fill you with something more
of mine; please my intentions are now
a vaccine. pleaseplease

Please
let me put this
in you, please and even out
our bodies, creating something good
inside of you please as if nothing bad

were ever put inside me. Please
let this be pure, pleaseplease even while
putrid things rise in my throat. I am
making this right. please You are

taking me in. Please. (stop sweating.)
Please. (let me take.)
Please. (let this time be clean.)

Gina Abelkop is a graduate of Antioch College. She lives in Seattle, where she pursues the Pacific and persistent rains. She has self-published a chapbook of her poetry and prose, We Can Be Very Lovely, and she edits and publishes the quarterly feminist literary journal Finery. Her collaboration with photographer Carrie Gabella is expected to appear in a forthcoming issue of Hothouse, published by Persephassa. For more information, visit www.birdsoflace.com.

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