Listen, it doesn’t happen overnight. One day, youwake up in the blue wreck of the thing, the thing beingyour bed, your cool morning, your mug, and suddenlyyou are the thing, your thingness apparent to you, youare a ruled thing, the thing once had a psyche, a libido,an enigmatic smile, but the thing doesn’t need to thinkabout that now, a thing cannot be safe or unsafe, a thingcannot speak a safe word and, therefore, does not needone, a thing thinks and unthinks and is instructed, athing can witness but not defend the dying lightfrothed out on the Formica table during an argument asthe sun downs, downs, downs and a fist slams, a thingyells back, but a yelling thing is just a thing, a thinking,fucking thing, the police come to ask the thing ifthe thing is okay, the neighbors are worried aboutthe thing, the neighbor is an eighty-something-year-oldwoman and has seen some things, but this thing isexasperated, this thing does not talk to cops, thingcannot believe their thingness, cannot understand howthey, bright-minded, well-loved, are not immuneto becoming a thing, a thing hates the discourse oftrauma, abhors becoming a cliché, the E.R. is now askingif thing, a grown thing, is sleeping with stuffed animalsafter thing passes out on the street, thing cannot bearto see the way people have been looking at them lately,lowering their voices in a piteous mist, thing gets drunkwith Aria who tells thing she, too, used to be a thing, oh,thing, poor thing, little thing, thing thinging, thing isa beautiful mess, thing walks in Prospect Park, thingkicks the snow and then apologizes, thing is the snow,thing bows at the end of her performance of thingnessonly to learn that all the world is a stage and there is noexit thing can see from the theatre, thing calls hermother but cannot bear to say, What is happening to me,thing calls her sister and tells her partial truths, a fewfriends tell thing it’s time, thing swears that there will beno poem about these months, thing is both speaker andbeloved, thing reads that June Jordan and AdrienneRich had a friendship falling-out but came backto each other, thing reads William Carlos Williams sawsixty patients a day during the Spanish flu and losta young colleague, thing reads Sonny Rollins practicedsaxophone on the Williamsburg Bridge for up to sixteenhours a day, thing will stay alive as long as she can readabout the real and the dead, thing packs her lunch,thing takes the bus to teach poems to women at nightwho don’t see thing as thing, and thing’s color returns alittle bit, every Tuesday, the women ask thing why otherwomen broke the line in the poem at the momentthat they did, the women are asking about enjambment,soft landings of the first unstressed iamb sound, hardlandings of a trochee like a trampoline into the heavens,the women are asking why we break at some words andnot at others, each time that thing has an answer, thingbecomes less thingy, thing has a lot of answers becausebefore thing was a thing, thing studied very hard, thinghad a good mind before sleeping next to something badfor thing, thing is not a doll and is not one of thosethings that secretly wanted to be a plaything, not oneof those writers who sells books about the half-hearted“transgression” of being spanked or whipped, cannot relateto the privilege of writing about being a thing, imaginemaking it art, how American, you American thing, youthing, pinging across the ocean like a downed planeconfessing its last mistakes, pinging like Beckett’s shortstory called “Ping,” how American, how American youare, Megan, I mean, just look at you, thing watches“Moonstruck,” thing doesn’t want to be fair, forgives noone, is not interested in healing, thing watches Cher say,I love him something awful, Ma, and Cher’s mother, withher silver hair gathering, gathering into a face, intothe years, says, That’s too bad.