Poetry by Kaci Skiles Laws

                        Anssi Koskinen CC



Human

Nothing prepares you for life the same way 
nothing prepares you for death,
the same way you can’t hold your breath

for too long, and you can’t predict the exact spot
a plane will fall out of the sky or why or
 
who you will meet, if they will administer
spiritual and physical venom, 
tea or Neosporin;
 
you won’t know you, you’ll divide yourself
into slivers of pie, eat every piece and
pretend
you didn’t eat the whole thing;
 
you won’t know how to say no until you do, 
distinguish blue from red 
or red from human, and it will be like trying

to eat a patch of wild cactus because
nothing can prepare you for hurt that blurs 
everything 
that made sense up to now;
 
you won’t want to see your contribution
to every broken thing, the things you didn’t break 
or have any control over,
you won’t understand how or why anything works 
 
and you won’t even care
and then you will;
you’ll shake life like a magic eight ball

until it bleeds incoherent blue ink;
you will until you can’t.



​Kaci Skiles Laws is a closet cat-lady and creative writer living in Dallas—Fort Worth. She is an editor at Open Arts Forum, and her writing has been featured in The Letters Page, Bewildering Stories, The American Journal of Poetry, Pif Magazine, The Blue Nib, Necro Magazine, and Ten Million Flies, among others. Her published work and blog can be viewed at https://kaciskileslawswriter.wordpress.com/.