I Was Hovering Just Below the Hospital Ceiling,

Contemplating My Death

by Alexis Rhone Fancher

When I glanced down and saw my body,

the suffering, damaged girl.

My beloved, nowhere to be found

had died on impact.

Now the ER doctors say I can go either way.

So I hover on the Sistine ceiling of the

I.C.U., undecided, my dead lover's

hand reaching for me

like God stretched for Adam.

The tubes and machines that keep me

earthbound give way.

We soar past the hospital morgue,

backtrack the highway, our bodies

unbroken, the crash spliced out.

My mother keens beside my hospital bed,

her fingers tangled in my blood-soaked hair,

picking at pieces of windshield.

Holding tight.

Years later I re-trace the road

between death and Santa Barbara,

how he cradled my head in his lap as he drove.

How he didn't want to go with me.

How I always got what I wanted.

All my life, such a greedy girl.

- - - - -

When I was twenty, a highway collision killed my fiancé and my unborn child. I survived only because I was asleep, my head on my fiancé's lap, when the driver of the other vehicle veered into our lane and crashed into us at 70mph. I have tried for years to write about the immediate aftermath. This poem is the first time I got it right.

* * * * *

"I Was Hovering Just Below the Hospital Ceiling, Contemplating My Death" was first published in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, http://www.glass-poetry.com/journal/2017/april/fancher-hovering.html

Alexis Rhone Fancher is the author of How I Lost My Virginity To Michael Cohen and other heart stab poems, (2014), State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies, (2015), and Enter Here (June, 2017). She is published in Best American Poetry, 2016, Rattle, Slipstream, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles, Hobart, Cleaver, and elsewhere. Her photos are published worldwide, including a spread in River Styx, and the covers of Witness, Heyday, and The Chiron Review. Since 2013 Alexis has been nominated for 11 Pushcart Prizes and 4 Best of the Net awards. She is Poetry Editor of Cultural Weekly, where she also publishes a monthly photo essay,"The Poet's Eye," about her on-going love affair with Los Angeles.