Fifteen Ways to Stay Alive

by Daphne Gottlieb

1.     Offer the wolves your arm only from the elbow down. Leave tourniquet space. Do not offer them your calves. Do not offer them your side. Do not let them near your femoral artery, your jugular. Give them only your arm.

2.     Wear chapstick when kissing the bomb.

3.     Pretend you don’t know English.

4.     Pretend you never met her.

5.     Offer the bomb to the wolves. Offer the wolves to the zombies.

6.     Only insert a clean knife into your chest. Rusty ones will cause tetanus. Or infection.

7.     Don’t inhale.

8.     Realize that this love was not your trainwreck, was not the truck that flattened you, was not your Waterloo, did not cause massive hemorrhaging from a rusty knife. That love is still to come.

9.     Use a rusty knife to cut through most of the noose in a strategic place so that it breaks when your weight is on it.

10.     Practice desperate pleas for attention, louder calls for help. Learn them in English, French, Spanish: May Day, Aidez-Moi, Ayúdeme.

11.     Don’t kiss trainwrecks. Don’t kiss knives. Don’t kiss.

12.     Pretend you made up the zombies, and only superheroes exist.

13.     Pretend there is no kryptonite.

14.     Pretend there was no love so sweet that you would have died for it, pretend that it does not belong to someone else now, pretend like your heart depends on it because it does. Pretend there is no wreck — you watched the train go by and felt the air brush your face and that was it. Another train passing. You do not need trains. You can fly. You are a superhero. And there is no kryptonite.

15.     Forget her name.