The Overmind

I was wearing a jellyfish over my head. I could barely see at all—
must have fallen down a basement aleph, bumping off the steps.

I imagine it was the same way I fell when my mother was pushed,
my foetus six months gestational inside her. The sting made my skin

feel like it was being flayed and, when I opened my eyes, I saw
the walls shudder, as if mid-quake. I asked the doctor, what is

the distance between curse and symptom and she wrote out
her reply on a prescription pad: it’s like trying to measure the smell

of death. June, the air thick as tar, a sixty foot truck came rolling off
Shore Drive onto 67th, smashing the side of the cab. I saw it all

in slow motion, wearing my jellyfish cape again, a tunnel of pixelated
shrapnel, the taxi driver’s airbag an exploding green mushroom.

Someone groans. Who are you? Face pressed against the glass, blood
on the dash. Turn off the ignition, turn it off, then doing it myself, but

unable to pull him out. I emerged from the sky-tilted passenger side,
as if opening the escape hatch on a submarine, and jumped down.

A fireman mummified my hands, and we stared at the battered cab,
the driver cut from the windscreen before shock-vomiting onto the verge.

Glowing red and white in the ambulance light, a young medic said:
you were lucky, most people don’t crawl out of those. I wanted to call

my daughter, Gaia, realising I could still hold her in my arms, see her
grow. Thank you. It is October, I have returned the jellyfish to the sea.

You’ve been given another chance said the doctor (strange term for anyone
on the brink of divorce). To survive, I must decomplexify everything:

no cigarettes, no meat, no wine, no love (not yet). It’s too early to say
how things are going. One day I might wake up and not feel the sting.