Such an adrenaline rush to find
myself alive
this seventh time, injected
with glee on the stretcher,
making my usual “I’m o.k.” calls,
and thinking I’d heard the surgeons’ banter
as I struggled to swim back up
to the light and cold,
their talk about a French film
recently revived,
but I couldn’t know for sure
because I was a body freeze-framed,
halted in black and white
on the grainy sand
of a beach like Antoine Doinel
trying to flee those 400 blows.
Maria Terrone’s poetry collections are Eye to Eye; A Secret Room in Fall (McGovern Prize, Ashland Poetry Press); The Bodies We Were Loaned; and a chapbook, American Gothic, Take 2. Her work has appeared in magazines including POETRY and Ploughshares and in more than twenty-five anthologies.
