[Poem-a-Week] Wildcat Canyon by Youssef Alaoui
Like a blotted circle in a crusty ash tray the moon is out and we drive to chase it across the bridge and into the night roll down the window I need to puke I leave pink racing stripes down the side of your ripped up four door these drugs set my teeth on edge I can hardly feel them your radio sucks like always can we listen to that old station from the forties not top forty? you say the forties gives you the creeps all whites there’s no going back there, man no I say but the times we know better but we don’t know you say we don’t know any better than we did and when I say we I do not mean we but I mean our country tis of them not thee or me it’s their memory even in the days of memory they were remembering other memories and you speed up the curvy mountain road toward the clouds yes now I just wish it would rain like it did when we were young when that storm asked to come in all night but I was too afraid to answer so alone after they cut my arm on the way home from school and you swerve to avoid a deer with your headlights off stop the car stop the car I say but you keep going and the mountain will never end so I am going to build a fort back here and light a candle for me to stare at then close my eyes and hope my brain stops spinning as my breaths become lives and I become one with the speeding car and the night and through me these breaths pass and you aren’t looking for the end of that crazy road wandering up to the sky in the deep of the dark not at all and I give up wanting I think of the lives I am breathing in and out in my fort of coats and dead bags taking account of the lungs this air has passed through in a day and I feel a state of grace swell within me releasing all artificial guilts so meaningless and at last you park the car by tugging the e-brake cranking the wheel hard left we slide in a spiral I am thrown against the door losing more of that take-out dinner when I realize your friends and family will leave you one by one until finally you die. You know that, right? *first published in Racket Journal, October 2020
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