Sunset today was a bonus, nearly unseen, the glorious colors (i can tell you) of the EpiPen that allowed me to breathe after the sting of the wasp, after the poison spread through my veins, abrasive on its way as i drove to town with my four-ways kaplinking, after my tongue thickened and my lips expanded until i could barley speak my name standing at the reception desk in the ER, and the shock of it, seeing myself in the protective glass looking like a Kardashian woman with an itching in my palms that would madden a monk. They treated me with alacrity and competence, and sent me home in an hour or two with snap patches on my torso, and open airways, and told me i could run if i felt like it, and i did after a sleep, filling my lungs with the rumors of night, the ferment of overripe apples, the heat off raked hay, even the dust off the road, raised by human transport over crushed limestone, a dust of the pulverized bones of sea creatures –– i cherished it all, and i stopped to watch the sunset with the katydids all around me creaking in their old rockers, all of it now as if it were the first time.
