{"id":2490,"date":"2006-04-09T19:42:07","date_gmt":"2006-04-10T02:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/?p=2490"},"modified":"2026-01-21T16:44:02","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T00:44:02","slug":"poor-nineteen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/2006\/04\/09\/poor-nineteen\/","title":{"rendered":"Poor Nineteen"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Poor Nineteen<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I did it because I could not sleep,<br \/>\nhad not slept for several nights.<\/p>\n<p>The air was cold as plate glass;<br \/>\nbreathing, like death by garrote.<br \/>\nClouds hissed and spat oblivion.<\/p>\n<p>He lingered a few feet down the aisle<br \/>\nby the hair products. I did it because I was laid off<br \/>\nfrom my dead-end job.<\/p>\n<p>I promised myself that I would only do it this once.<br \/>\nIn a world where I had nothing, felt smothered.<br \/>\nThe bleat of the register kept time to the whine of Muzak.<br \/>\nA clerk rang up my purchase: a can of mousse.<br \/>\nIn my gut, a tingled warning; he materialized<br \/>\na few feet from the door, sidled up to me, pressed<br \/>\nhis hand on my arm:<br \/>\n\u201cI believe you put something in your purse. Nytol.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>I did it because I was choking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Poor Nineteen I did it because I could not sleep, had not slept for several nights. The air was cold as plate glass; breathing, like death by garrote. Clouds hissed and spat oblivion. He lingered a few feet down the aisle by the hair products. I did it because I was laid off from my [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[218,28,215,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aenigmas","category-humanities","category-poetry","category-social-science"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2490"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10344,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2490\/revisions\/10344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}