When June Osborn in The Handmaid’s Tale said she felt like the word

“shatter”

I thought of the heeled woman flying off the building like a flightless bird to her 

“shattering”

in 2001, or, even then, when I dropped fine China on the hardwood

—crack, shatter— 

I bent down to pick up the pieces and shoved them in my mouth, 

smiling at my mother with broken, ceramic teeth, all jagged 

and primal when they 

—shatter, cracked— 

like the woman’s acrylics at the bar on the whisky glass she slid down 

the mahogany toward the old man and his younger lady, who slumped 

in her feathered dress like a dead bird on her stool

—yes, she too was crack-shattered— 

not in the same way the woman plummeting from the Twin Towers was—

but inside her lungs, there was that same 

—crack-shatter—

beat being cranked from the speakers in the way that swing bars pulse

and in the way I find the car door locked when I try to go back inside

to save her, but car tires are restless in that they

—crack and shatter—

everything below them as they escape like the woman sailing toward

the earth, fatally serendipitous, and how she must have

“shattered” 

long before her flight, long before her fall, and long before me.