Susan Wicks

To Alison

When they gave you your plates to hand on to some new doctor, you held them up to the window and saw the sky in them, the river running through your skull, twigs meeting at the cerebellum, your brain uncurling, tentative as a snail on its late glide-path. Since then I have often thought of snails and their reflexes, seeing a slice of America green through your head’s filter.