I am a poet preparing for intubation.

I wake up and my bladder is a weight I must carry.

Frostbite has broken the necks of false spring’s daffodils

which flop over at their white points of injury.

My girlhood invokes girdles, early evenings spent squeezing

into Spanx. Late adulthood invokes flabbiness,

a coordinated, two-person turning job, get the vessel

on its side, turn, get the broken vessel back on its back.

On the worst date I ever went on, water was trapped

in the faucet under his shower head before I slammed

the plunger. And I slammed the plunger, returned

home to a comfort zone. I have changed for you.

I mean, I will change for you. I can’t tell you much

about it now, but my poems are flowers torn

from what rooted them, leaking milky sap and latex

from their fibrous stems; they’re bundled up with endotracheal tubes

ripped like lawn mower engine pull cords from the throats

of the women before me, I hold them out to you, asking you to understand.