Another Creature: Poems

Destiny Car

Destiny Car Some nights we meet out on the killer highway one girl was scooped off of, paralyzed for life. Another died head-on with a family of four while her girlfriends danced on, in the glittering wreck of The Dome, and we whispered I love you No I love you more Here in Dreamland we’re made of lips and tongues. Here we are ageless, disembodied, pure smoke of intuition, goofy-stoned. My tiny dream hands in the hollows of your dream shoulders. Over the MC5’s thwack and clobber, Earth life calls come back, come back, the way the still-living call out to the gone. Come back to the tangled garden, the stink of petunias, the driveway cracks. The cupboards full of rain and cereal bowls. But here we are seventeen and your slim boy hips, your hair loose from its ponytail, the electric plea let me be who I am in the sound that abounds and resounds and rebounds off the ceiling 8 And what does it mean when The Dome catches fire, the way our parents always knew it would, hot grease and battered onions? When we lose each other in the crush of teens pushing toward one exit, I find my green velvet jacket, my favorite scarf in the parking lot, soaked with your Brut cologne. Climb into the destiny car, someone says, and I’m driving the killer highway alone, back home to my fenced-in yard and my steady man, onion patchouli smoke clinging to my hair. 9 ...