In the 5 p.m. dark, we sit in the car waiting
to meet a stranger in Logan Square
about their bed frame. We listen to a message
from a friend in medical school: her effusive voice
describing how she could feel the broken ribs
of a man underneath her grip as she performed
CPR for the first time. It sounds
like he was already dead. She performed CPR
on a corpse? you ask, but I’m certain
she left out the part where she saved his life,
and so I ask her. In the evening our mattress,
still on the floor. I stand at our new kitchen counter
prying open a pomegranate in a white, cotton
shirt, red juice pooling on my chin. Raising
my right arm and then my left, you pull the shirt
from my back. I carry on gnawing at the seeds
eating them bare-chested with the dog
at my feet. The wind in the new city sounds at night
like a child screaming and the dog wakes us
by arguing with it. I can hear you
in the bathroom on the other side of the wall, hunched
over the corroded sink, blotting the stain
out of my shirt with dish soap. When my friend
responds that, yes, the man was likely already dead
when he flew in on the gurney after jumping
from a bridge, I keep it from you.
RACHEL CASTRO is a writer from Virginia and holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, Ox-Bow School of Art, and the Loft Literary Center, among others, and appears in Poetry Northwest. Rachel lives in Chicago and is a student in the MA Program in Social Work, Social Policy, and Social Administration at the University of Chicago.