Fight Or Flight
-Fight – go to Option 1
-Flight – go to Option 2
Option 1
I choose hard. See if I can get you spitting and swearing
you never knew how big you were, a lumbering bear with five o’clock shadow
in our kitchen. I push harder, lance the boil, but I don’t love myself
enough to let your ugly words slide. They stay like ticks in my skin and
weeks later I’ll find them dead and swollen under my clothes
but I remember the pain.
I don’t know why I have to prove that you don’t scare me
like a kid in a storm drain. All I really want is for you
to choose me again, like you did all those years ago, pick me
I promise I’m good enough. Real strength, I think, would be
if I didn’t need you, if you didn’t mess me up for everyone else
when I come downstairs for dinner wearing my mother’s shirt
and they ask me why I’ve been crying.
Option 2
I choose fast. I choose fresh air and the fields, rich with the tang of the farm drains
and chiming with little birdsong. This is me, army of one, but I can’t hold myself
the way another person could. Every time I run I see myself tough and fleet
like a wizened rabbit, and thick seagrass falling at my feet when the sand slips.
In the clarity of the late spring night my fingers are quietly going numb, followed
by the rest of me. I force it.
I don’t need you.
All I need is even ground and a steady heartbeat. I have a head start.
I’m going to go back to stony silence, a leaden quiet; but it’s temporary, it is.
Under my own roof my quiet is mine, and I choose it, again and again and again.
The only person left to run from will be me
and I’m good at staying ahead.
Breath, breath, pace yourself. Keep going, indefinitely.
Daisy Harris
A choose-your-own-adventure poem!
Daisy Harris Poetry 