Tracy chapman’s “fast car”
Plays in urgent care
Kara Lewis
where I clutch my kidneys like a pair of keys. Alarm ringing. Tracy sings about getting jobs and seeing what it means to be living. I am allowed to live because I have a job. The cross on the insurance card I hand to the receptionist means I’m anointed, having chosen from plans named after precious metals. Nonrenewable and needing excavation like an organ. Every time I lose a job like a slippery golden ring, the company tells me about COBRA. The snake around my neck agrees not to bite for a price. Kidneys are biblical—good and evil. I get adult diapers delivered and pee freely, unceasing, like the first woman on Earth. My body towers, the house in the suburbs Tracy wishes for, full of unknown rooms. I thought my kidney was my appendix, messaged getting my appendix out i think brb to my boss. Like how an old watch used to beep underneath my parents’ couch cushions and I didn’t know where it was coming from, couldn’t shut it off. My parents in another state’s suburbs are my emergency contacts. Though I know my dad won’t answer his phone. He live with the bottle that’s the way it is. My grandma says my dad drinks because working puts his body in so much pain. I’m the same, remixed but not different. My corkscrew a quieter instrument than dad’s bottle opener, its percussive clinking. People keep remaking “Fast Car” because it keeps being true. My friend calls the song embarrassing, and maybe it is, this persistent hoping for better. I’d always hoped for better than a sick note and
a hug react on Slack, a walkup one bedroom to come home to. You can survive with one kidney. Tracy sings about life’s exercise in prescriptions and rations, in what else we can do without and the dreams we can’t stop cupping like pills or a lover’s cheek. My partner’s arm feels nice wrapped around my shoulder after he bakes for us, folding jam into pastry crust. I fold myself into blankets and bed rest. When I sleep on my back like the nurse suggests I’m practicing being dead. Like the mummies buried with kidneys and hearts still intact. How long will I be able to keep this arm around my shoulder, my organs inside my body, my body like a feeling I can belong to? Kidneys are a sacrifice and I’m a cherubic checkout girl eager for promotion, ascension. I arrange them on a plate like a steak bloodied and embalmed.