and they tasted like the day you could’ve died,
the smell of mulled alcohol and bile, the flood
spilling wine onto your favorite dog park zip-up
ripped at the hem from puppy teeth. They cut
it off of you in the ambulance. It swallowed you
whole, the sirens shrilly painting the neighborhood
a blue and red hellscape, echo-chambering inside
a suburban idyll. The EMTS said they had to
pin you down how they once pinned me down.
That you screamed how I once screamed. 
In the waiting room I replayed the image of myself
dying, my face morphing into yours, older, sagging
when you blacked out on the bed. I wove in and out
of sleep while you laid in the small white room, IVs
laced to your inner arms like clear power cables. 
You were just a little drunk. I was just your baby girl
and your mother and your best friend and your nurse
and the wine and the room and the saline in your arms,
and the reason you drank. You remembered me trying
to die my own small death, the bottle of pills you left out,
the locked door, weeping, my hand to your face, my face
paling haloed by fake brown hair, an ode to your own.
And when you had the first sip did it taste like my smile?
And was it the real smile when you and I snuck flowers
into the backyard, or watched bad horror, or got a dog?
Or was it my smile in the ER thinking I had finally done it?
I hoped you couldn’t save me. But then you saved me.
So I got to save you.