This Blessing of Less Harm

The car may not have ripped clean through that night
but a soft glittering of thick sugar-flake snow

on the back street I take home from work, flashing emergency
lights and tow truck behemoth down the center line.

The car may not have spun and screamed and shredded itself
across ice. I may not have seen what I saw while you left-

turned, braked confidently on tires that did not kill us
as we drove to the small, stupid emergency I built like an escape

hatch—but that halved car and its ghostly cohort, that miracle
of witnessing worse. Our first elevator ride together in a hospital

my fault, this blessing of less harm, stitches and sutures and gauze
or the paperback novel, the convincing story, the restaurant work

and roommates which put me next to you, rolling past the aftermath
of accident, grateful to maybe-dead strangers for their distraction.

On the back street I take home from work, past an invisible underground.
In the ER, lying. In the wreckage of three cars in a snowstorm

just past the intersection, just past the traffic light, just past the point
at which you know me and choose me still, with both hands

twisted in my lap, with my definitely-dead friend’s cold face
in a hotel bathtub, with those maybe-dead strangers pulled

out of metal and their torn, wet clothes and their histories
and mine, it’s all mine, I let the nurse sew it back inside—

Carly Madison Taylor is a poet, songwriter, and essayist living in Buffalo, NY. She earned her BA in Creative Writing and Dance Studies from Knox College in 2016. More of her work can be found at The Shore, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Memoir Mixtapes, Blanket Sea Magazine, Vamp Cat Magazine, and elsewhere. She’s on Twitter @carma_t and Instagram @car_ma_t.