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It was hard to imagine her not in pieces.
Limbs restrung, scattered teeth realigned
inside an unscarred mouth. She was easier
disassembled and redesigned with false parts.
Before the accident, she was the woman we avoided
black beehive wig balanced over dark eyes and a face
grown slack with Southern Comfort. We pretended
we couldn't hear her talk to herself while we sped by
on bikes that would rust before the year was up.
We learned not to brake on her street.
In treehouses, we gathered with rumors of witchery
but when she smoked in her webbed chair,
sending wreathes into the warm trailer park air,
she left her front door ajar and we saw velvet
prints of Elvis, a collection of Florida license plates,
and nothing mysterious. Still we kept our distance.
The accident erased all chance of sorcery.
In the languid air of summer, she stared at us
who had come to stare at her. She pulled up
her pant leg and knocked on the plastic underneath,
smooth and proud as a Barbie calf: the untangling
of her leg from her body, the confusion of skin and plastic.
We circled and touched until even this was nothing new.
When we left, she would uncap her leg and lift
it in the air over her head. She would shake it at our bicycles
and when we turned to look back, we would see
an amazing thing: a woman with a leg in her raised
right arm, smoke rising over her tight face, her drilled eyes,
a headful of coarse black hair fallen to the ground.
It was hard not to imagine her, in pieces.
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