Its equine wall eyes, stark against its slick black fur,  

with bloodshot lids flush with the bath’s surface,  

ogled me with anticipation as I decided  

whether or not I could dismantle my razor again,  

to cut my wrists the right way this time.  

I had thalassophobia in that bath  

cooled with time,  

because it held six million acre feet beneath me  

and the Kelpie,  

the size of those in Falkirk,  

with hooves reversed in grotesque distortion,  

who faced me, nose to nose,  

and whose eyes crazed over me as it watched me deliberate 

between a fistful of oxycodone and a high place to fall from, 

between carbon monoxide through a vacuum hose  

and drinking myself into fatal repose.  

The Kelpie grew bigger with the possibility of Chris finding me like that, 

or my parents, cleaning the blood,  

my son forgetting me,  

and I saw it salivating for my ideation.  

I begged it to let me mount it,  

to grasp its serpentine mane  

while it dove into the lapis lazuli bathwater  

sinking so fast my lungs would fill  

and I’d fall still. 

But it didn’t move or blink, so I settled on pills  

as it stared through me, light leaving  

until it aggressively submerged, itself only,  

resurfacing as my son, 10 months and tiny.  

The blue became his eyes, glistering as he splashed in my bath 

convincing me to splash too.  

Body cherubic and fair hair, slick to his forehead,  

he sang something, or said it,  

indecipherable like Gaelic I’ll never learn.  

He crawled to me across the now shallow bath  

and arranged himself against my womb and chest  in a fatuous

embrace, laughing at it all before turning and holding,  with

fae-like hands,  

my face.