How To Survive
by Theodora Goss

In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy.
–Lorna Simpson

In a dream
you saw a way to survive
the drowning,
the death by arsenic, by lightning,
death by the sword, by pistol,
by ennui and all the various ways
you could have died,
falling from the parapet, inside
the belly of a whale. You found
a way to survive the scenarios
you had imagined,
the despair of consciousness,
of being.

You escaped the lion’s mouth,
the serpent’s tooth,
the hangman’s rope, the dagger
of the assassin,
all the fears unleashed when Pandora
opened her box.
And you found, somehow,
joy at the bottom of the basin.
It was unfolding slowly,
like a photograph developing
in darkness, to show
something miraculous,
something worth all the striving,
the waiting.

(The image is Jour de Morts by Carlos Schwabe.)