Stipulations

One day you will find a dead body in a grassy ditch near the road, just as you imagined. The trash bag flaps in the wind. But the body won’t belong to anyone, and no one will actually be dead. These are your stipulations. One day you will be shot in the arm. You will stay in the hospital long enough for yellow tulips wheeled in on a cart. A man will come into the house and attack your family, but no one will be scared. You will wrestle the gun away from him and shoot him in the head, but it won’t make a mess on your mother’s crisp white walls. And he won’t actually be dead. These are your stipulations. You will be in a head-on collision on a bendy road in Virginia flanked by trees. A figure in a heavy coat will use the Jaws of Life. He will smell of smoke. And when you lie in bed, the angel who’s been waiting in the shadows your entire life approaches and whispers the secret of heaven. He is full of light. You are wide awake. And you will live forever.

Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, Paper Doll Fetus, and Sightseer, as well as the chapbook Her Human Costume. Hoffman is a former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Director’s Guest at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board. Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Fence, Blackbird, diode, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. More at cynthiamariehoffman.com.