I kept a diary

of my years in the Rancho Mirage

prison, each entry exactly the same,

except the night I walked out on him

and into the bar to write about dead birds.

I must have found a crumb of courage

under my desk and licked it up.

Some of the letters wavered

like mirages in their circles of dried

teardrop, but not all of them.

Getting along these days, I wrote,

then, another stupid fight.

Abruptly I stopped writing

two days before I turned 30. As if

I couldn’t stand the humiliation

a single day into my new decade,

not now that I was older and out

of excuses. My diary stopped

but the same life continued

for another year. We moved

to Chinatown, lightning set fire

to the upstairs bathroom, we

moved again. Without

the diary I don’t know

what I was thinking

but in my phone is a grid

of identical selfies, proof I tried

to find an angle where I didn’t

look so sad.

I think when he wouldn’t dance

is when I realized and if they don’t

dance, well… well I stopped

writing and pretended

I didn’t want

to dance, I whittled my body

into an arrowhead at Blue Sky Yoga

and I began to tunnel

on purpose under the sand

like the shallow tangled mass

of a cactus root system. I hid out

just below the surface of myself.

I started to collect the sunlight

that used to burn.

I think of my 30-year-old self as

this idiot but really I was living

on the deep instinct of survival,

I was a sharp thing hoarding

what little I could drink.

I didn’t know it because

I wasn’t sentient at the time

but I had a plan.

When he noticed me again,

when he came to cut me down,

I was ready. I drew blood.