I coveted your spine. That glossy brown topography of darting muscles and sinew, a string of bone-pearls keeping you erect. I believed it: a good fight is better than a good man.
 
It was Oklahoma. I was seven, my heart was broken, and you were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. O god, the bruises, bodies flung against ring ropes, a man named Hunter to love. I loved you best all rewilding: hooker-red lipstick, waxed thighs, black leather for miles.
 
The women I knew feared the fist; not you. When your action figure came out, I bought two. I made your plastic legs part. Seven became ten became twenty-two. What I mean is I drank and snorted. What I mean is I tore bread so the birds would come. I watched your sex tape to see if you’d cry. I wanted to see the secrets of a woman who had none.
 
You dove into a fish tank once, after too many cocktails. You had to be yanked out. They called it lunacy but I know you did it for the slow resurface, black hair plastered wetly against bare breasts. The great fall of, screamed the headline. A woman can spend a lifetime wiping a man from her thighs.
 
Chyna, I went for a run yesterday and realized it was spring already, the trees shaking their Marie Antoinette wigs into a savage green. The fog lifted as I ran; the world brightens with or without us. Here’s life. Myths that scuttle into nothing like arks breaking the sea. The Victorians had it right: a woman needs a world that makes her small. But you already knew that, didn’t you.