By Avra Wing

At Rusk, the PTs said don’t look down,
keep your eyes on where you’re headed,
but you know where you’re headed if you
do—the sidewalk fraught, swelling up from
tree roots trapped beneath them, the edges
of the concrete slabs mismatched by inches,
even fractions of inches, the corner cuts
necessitating a change in the angle of your step.
Fear holds on tight: the wild driver ahead
of you on Flatbush Saturday night, weaving
through traffic, or when you take the crazy
curves on the narrow Jackie, neck and neck
with another car. It’s always anticipating the
thwack of impact. Knowing what can happen
because it has happened—to you, your buddies
in rehab, the names in today’s news—that it
could happen to people you love and you can’t
protect them. You couldn’t save your mother,
your puny attempts to help your sister went
nowhere. You tick off another birthday of the
man who lies beside you, who you check for
every morning—the one you tell slow down,
watch out, red light—compare his age to the ages
of his parents when they died. It’s the fear of the
loneliness if he wasn’t there, that you’ll live on
till 93 like your father, unless something else happens,
some horror you won’t name, that you can’t survive.

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Avra Wing’s poems appeared most recently in Grist, Healing Muse, and Hanging Loose, and are upcoming in Santa Fe Literary Review and Image. She is the author of two novels: Angie, I Says, a New York Times “notable book” made into the film Angie; and After Isaac, for young adults. Avra leads a writing workshop at the Center for Independence of the Disabled New York.