She gripped the steering wheel resolutely and refused to blink away the tears blurring the highway. The same sad song played on repeat and when she could remember to, she sang along. Now and then she felt that she wasn’t breathing and let a few bullish exhales blast through her nostrils. And then the ragged inhale, like a hiccup. She imagined her blood cells as tiny boats carrying little packages of oxygen through her body and the tight chest feeling breaks. A cool easiness oozes from her core to her extremities. She watched the pink rush back to her fingernails and the road become clear as the tears dive from her eyelids to her cheeks. A look in the rearview mirror made her smile maniacally and she thought hard about breathing so the tight chest feeling wouldn’t come back yet. The road stretched straight and lazy disappearing between a V of cornfields several miles back. His head bobbed dumbly in and out of the frame of her view.

“I guess now is the time when I’m supposed to say something crazy like ‘It didn’t have to be like this’ or ‘How could you do it?’ Right? Finish painting my martyr mask and take the stage on my own personal tragedy. You’d love that, wouldn’t you.”

He responded with a few panicky grunts muffled by the hood.

The hood might be a bit much, she thought, and her throat closed. She realized with a choke that she had really come this far and couldn’t turn back now. The insanity was tenuous and wavering, and as reason peeked through the muddle of her mind – a swirl of emotions in finger paints, rage and hurt and fear and betrayal – the tight chest feeling wound itself around her lungs again. Her eyes burned.

A few deliberate grunts hummed through the hood.

“What was that?”

Grunts again, this time with the rhythm and inflection of speech more distinct.

“Speak up, I can’t hear you,” she grinned through the new tears, ” ‘Where-are-you-tak-ing-me?’ Is that what you said? ‘Where are you taking me?’ Where am I taking you. Well.”

She turned down the music. Her foot pressed the gas. She let herself get lost in the coral sunset smeared above the cornfields, but felt too hollow to cry anymore. She was just about to remember to answer his question when a familiar three syllable grunt lilted through the hood.

A spray of gravel from the road’s narrow shoulder cascaded around the car as she skidded to a halt – in a flash, she was in the backseat at his throat yanking the hood back to reveal his eyes, gripping his face like a vise, watching her nails sink into his jaw. She tried not to recoil from the softness of his cheeks or kiss him or trace his eyebrow with her lips. “Say ‘I love you’ one more time,” she growled through clenched teeth, “and some poor trucker will have to squeegie your tongue off his windshield.”

She threw his head back against the window, then leaned in to cover him again, with a slow tenderness. And got back in the driver’s seat. Put on her seatbelt. And with a breath, began to drive.

intimacy issues
“Seasons. I mean, seasons man. I feel em. It’s hard when there is so much distance, but things like seasons give you something to hold on to, dig your nails in. Like moons. Big beer-colored moons, wheat colored moons, shit that makes your breath get caught up in your throat. You look up. You see a big ass moon, beautiful moon. And you know that thing is big enough and high enough that she can see it right now. If she looks up right now, she’ll see this same moon. And so you smile. That’s why seasons…I mean, moons don’t get like that just all the time. It’s gotta be that slip. Trees sucking color back in, frost just forming. That slip between seasons, summer to autumn, autumn to winter. Shit you know she can feel, that y’all can feel at the same time, like a kiss or a joke.

She wasn’t looking for moons. Or thinking about me gazing up to feel her. There’s so much I didn’t see. She probably ain’t never even catch the sky like that. Such a fool. I was such a fool, to think she gave a damn about December sunsets.

I mean, you ever seen the sun set into the froze-up lake?

But what’s fucked up is it never goes away. I carry her in those moons. She bleeds into my fucking sunsets. Like, I can’t have my own moons anymore. All I feel is her. I mean, all I feel is hurt.

No, I feel nothing.

Man. I don’t feel anything at all.”

She

She hatched with a rainwet smile
She had lips a crimson bruise
She smoldered, she dared.
She rolled open her palm like scrolls

She reached for inkwoven brows
She sucked them playfully to say:
She was golden locket, she was the solid ring
She never wavered in her gaze

She started at the first blow
She nursed her exploded jaw
She did not shield against the rest
She deserved them all

She let them ugly up her face
She uglied it herself
She healed and pouted lips again
She pouted and she bled

She drained the blush from slope of cheek
She emptied poems from her wrists
She metronomed her vicious hips
She lowered eyes to crescent coal

She softened with the spring though
She damned herself to that, she did
She always opened pink and raw
She erased even and insouciant

She, who haunted Eden’s obelisks and mausolea
She echoed dirges, she filled urns
She loved and loved again
She loved and loved and loved

She coiled around
She oiled scalps
She roiled rhymes hummed into ribs
She boiled water for his tea

She smeared the honey
She held the pot
She let him dip his finger in
She saw him hammerfist it

She pounded at her throat
She shrieked to please explain
She bloodied stars, she tore the harps
She wound its strings around her face

She began the weaving then
She studied many masks
She looked like ghosts of girls she’d been
She said let them kill a girl so dead

She fit it to her pretty face
She chafed beneath its weight
She bit the blisters, sipped the salt
She forgot the rainwet lips, they forgot how to taste

She is stone
She is chalk
She grays
She, smoke tumbling from his lips

She was seen again at the graves last night
She couldn’t cry at all
She scattered shriveled roses
She crunched over their thorns

She hummed some silly song
She gloomed about the stones
She peeks alive from time to time
She wants someone to see, she does

She sang something that goes like this,
she moaned over the gusts:
“She trusts, she does. She must. Or the golden locket rusts.
She sheds the armor, wipes her lips of dust.

She sips the sweet of dusk. She loves.”