Cause of Injury

Garden hose.

Green, coiled at the edge of my uncle's yard.

I caught my foot on it completely—

chin into the gravel, the kind of fall

that doesn't give you time to be graceful.

Four stitches. The ER quiet at six on a Sunday.

A nurse asked what happened.

I said garden hose.

She wrote it down without expression—

just wrote it down,

the pen attached to the clipboard with a rubber band,

and moved to the next box.

My handwriting under cause of injury:

hose.

In my neatest letters,

as if that was going to help anything.

The form is somewhere now, filed.

My uncle already calls it a funny story.

I'm still in the part that comes before.