I split three pills with my ficus and now
it’s being weird. It won’t drink my breath or eat
the sun or fight off
the spider and his wife, whom I also
split three pills with,
because it’s Christmas, because
I was sad driving past
the shuttered stationery shop and the woman
dragging her kid on a leash.
I split three pills with the woman
and three pills with the kid. I measured my heart rate
and pronounced myself legally dead. My ficus
gave me three pills. I felt better. I told
a bath towel, and my friend’s bulldog,
and the dregs at the bottom
of my tea. I told the three pills in my pocket
and the three pills
in my bed. Each one
a loose pearl
ready to string together
in my belly, in the bellies of people I loved
or thought of when I watched a pigeon
disappear inside a hawk.
Copyright © 2019 Ruth Madievsky. This poem originally appeared in Kenyon Review, May/June 2019. Reprinted with permission of the author.