Driving through the Country before You Are Born: Poems

Go

1 Go You know the word doesn’t sit well, yet you round the vowel as if you know what you are talking about. Like sitting in traffic with your hands between your knees and a whisper stuck in your throat.There are no excuses. Cars race at an impossible pace around you, a dog darts from house to house then four lanes over to the other side, never lifts his head to look.A nickel rolls along the walk, and you don’t know which side to be on, which house should go where, which direction is better. Perhaps it is friction that you are after: rubber to asphalt, skin to skin, two lovers going at it in the back of a Suburban in the middle of an empty parking lot, rowdy kids running through the hallways of old churches, sand against the bottom of the bottle, the sun on your chest and throat. ...