Listen, it doesn’t happen overnight. One day, you
wake up in the blue wreck of the thing, the thing being
your bed, your cool morning, your mug, and suddenly
you are the thing, your thingness apparent to you, you
are a ruled thing, the thing once had a psyche, a libido,
an enigmatic smile, but the thing doesn’t need to think
about that now, a thing cannot be safe or unsafe, a thing
cannot speak a safe word and, therefore, does not need
one, a thing thinks and unthinks and is instructed, a
thing can witness but not defend the dying light
frothed out on the Formica table during an argument as
the sun downs, downs, downs and a fist slams, a thing
yells back, but a yelling thing is just a thing, a thinking,
fucking thing, the police come to ask the thing if
the thing is okay, the neighbors are worried about
the thing, the neighbor is an eighty-something-year-old
woman and has seen some things, but this thing is
exasperated, this thing does not talk to cops, thing
cannot believe their thingness, cannot understand how
they, bright-minded, well-loved, are not immune
to becoming a thing, a thing hates the discourse of
trauma, abhors becoming a cliché, the E.R. is now asking
if thing, a grown thing, is sleeping with stuffed animals
after thing passes out on the street, thing cannot bear
to see the way people have been looking at them lately,
lowering their voices in a piteous mist, thing gets drunk
with Aria who tells thing she, too, used to be a thing, oh,
thing, poor thing, little thing, thing thinging, thing is
a beautiful mess, thing walks in Prospect Park, thing
kicks the snow and then apologizes, thing is the snow,
thing bows at the end of her performance of thingness
only to learn that all the world is a stage and there is no
exit thing can see from the theatre, thing calls her
mother but cannot bear to say, What is happening to me,
thing calls her sister and tells her partial truths, a few
friends tell thing it’s time, thing swears that there will be
no poem about these months, thing is both speaker and
beloved, thing reads that June Jordan and Adrienne
Rich had a friendship falling-out but came back
to each other, thing reads William Carlos Williams saw
sixty patients a day during the Spanish flu and lost
a young colleague, thing reads Sonny Rollins practiced
saxophone on the Williamsburg Bridge for up to sixteen
hours a day, thing will stay alive as long as she can read
about the real and the dead, thing packs her lunch,
thing takes the bus to teach poems to women at night
who don’t see thing as thing, and thing’s color returns a
little bit, every Tuesday, the women ask thing why other
women broke the line in the poem at the moment
that they did, the women are asking about enjambment,
soft landings of the first unstressed iamb sound, hard
landings of a trochee like a trampoline into the heavens,
the women are asking why we break at some words and
not at others, each time that thing has an answer, thing
becomes less thingy, thing has a lot of answers because
before thing was a thing, thing studied very hard, thing
had a good mind before sleeping next to something bad
for thing, thing is not a doll and is not one of those
things that secretly wanted to be a plaything, not one
of those writers who sells books about the half-hearted
“transgression” of being spanked or whipped, cannot relate
to the privilege of writing about being a thing, imagine
making it art, how American, you American thing, you
thing, pinging across the ocean like a downed plane
confessing its last mistakes, pinging like Beckett’s short
story called “Ping,” how American, how American you
are, Megan, I mean, just look at you, thing watches
“Moonstruck,” thing doesn’t want to be fair, forgives no
one, is not interested in healing, thing watches Cher say,
I love him something awful, Ma, and Cher’s mother, with
her silver hair gathering, gathering into a face, into
the years, says, That’s too bad.