by Pat Hale

Try bread. Try water.
Try reaching further
than you think you can.

Hold your breath, close your eyes
and imagine that translucent sliver of bone,
how it arced and twisted and caught in your throat.

Imagine its movement
to a place of lesser pain.

Imagine you or someone
had paid better attention,
taken more time.

Think of how the tip of a knife
can cleanly dissect sliver from flesh,
a complete and perfect separation.

Imagine that before you started,
you or someone
had made a pile of the tiny bones,

counted them
and swept them all away,
each fragile, tenacious bone.

Pat Hale’s publications include the poetry collections, Seeing Them with My Eyes Closed, and Composition and Flight. Her work appears in Calyx, Connecticut River Review, Lily Poetry Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, and many other journals, and is anthologized in Forgotten Women, Waking Up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis, and elsewhere. She has been awarded CALYX’s Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize, the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, and first prize in the Al Savard Poetry Competition. She lives in Connecticut, where she serves on the board for the Riverwood Poetry Series.