In the eleventh hour of standing in ceremony
she punched a hole through me:
“Here. A souvenir.”
Three decades of Lone Star living
and all I got was this plastic card
with a hole in it.
Seismic shifts of paperwork
deposit me like Dottie from the whirlwind,
newly claimed by the land hucksters at home
(home?)
threaten we’ll turn into, crushed by green houses.
I see your toes curling when I tell you I did it anyway.
Before becoming a tourist in my hometown,
the mechanic asked, tinned local stock,
“So, are you going to become a fruit
or a nut?”
The card was unpunched then,
not yet a keepsake of this question.
In all the forms and records,
I never found those boxes for ticking,
“fruit” or “nut.”
The heart in the corner
only says to cut me up when I’m roadkill
and divvy out the spoils.
So I took my deep-buried heart,
lungs and spleen, liver and kidneys,
all the offal a U-Haul could tow.
I took the donor heart with me,
gave it away from where it sat languishing
under the color of my eyes.
The chip punched out of a former life
became a period at the end of a run-on
sentence about selves.
I am now a visitor in two places,
home ground and foreign soil both,
a piece of plastic with a hole
where my life used to be.
If I look through it,
walls fraction my scope,
bounded by skies big and wide —
souvenir of a dimmed view.
I’ve ticked the third box instead
and my party favors are in the mail.
Helen Doremus is a screenwriter and storyteller based in Los Angeles. A native of Fort Worth, Texas, Helen has come to most things in life slightly sideways of the prescribed fashion, accumulating odd bits of life as she goes. A choral singer, a kung fu practitioner, a Santa Fe Johnnie, a fiber artist, a high school dropout, a CASA volunteer, and a member of the asexual community, Helen’s first published work was a wordsearch celebrating the 25th anniversary of Sesame Street and her first film was as an unnamed child in a movie that was never released. She is a recent graduate of Antioch University Los Angeles and the screenplay she wrote as an independent study while attending, “Romanza,” won fifth place in the 2019 Launch Million Dollar Student Screenplay Contest.