I am a to-do list in snow boots wavering between day dream
and day dread. As college students rush toward the bus, I imagine
slumping to the sidewalk with my face curled to my knees. I beg
the inner nymph to take over. Life lately is watching my hair fall
out in the shower. It is sleep as my only entertainment. It is lugging
the sack of myself to the front of the classroom to make sounds
at students who sit at barren desks with a phone in their hands. I
am tired of tending to this body, the flesh tube that it is. If I were
a rock, I would leak nothing. Rocks don’t cry and feel guilty about
it. Rocks don’t sit on toilets and force tampons up their vaginas.
When I was growing up, my mom always complained about 6 PM
school activities. When do Americans eat dinner? This Saturday, I
eat a thin layer of jam on a slice of bread, an ice cream sandwich,
an unripe apple. The choice between rock and rock bottom is
simple. Rocks don’t have to buy groceries, pay taxes, clean their
apartments, wash their hair, clatter from task to task
while ignoring the blazing protests of the mind. If I were a rock, I
wouldn’t have a hand down my throat rummaging like a claw
machine for a poem because there would be no poem to find. It
would just be rock. Sometimes when I’m dreaming, I discover I
can’t move any part of my body. I am eerily at ease being removed
from my musculature. It’s like the scene in that one movie when the rock
throws herself down into the canyon and the mom rock
throws herself after her. I want my mom rock to come to me and
cook me dinner, scoop my hair out of the shower drain.

Angela Lim is a poet, editor, and educator who is interested in poems that disorient and guide. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Indiana University and currently lives in St. Louis. Her poems can be found in Red Rock Review and Banyan Review.