You’re driving
in your sleep again,
stopping just in time
for all the baby ducks to cross the road.
You dig your fingers
into my leg
like I’m a styrofoam
cup to ask if I’m okay.
I consider which of your eyes to poke out first:
I want to be your blindspot.
Pull over, past the outlet mall, I’ll let you cut all my hair off
at the next rest stop toilet bowl.
You slur your words like a typewriter.
I think you say you don’t want to, and I say, “Do what?”
and you say, “Wake up.”
My insides are elevator cogs, mechanics whirring
up and down,
cables hissing like
your mom’s mean alleycat. I want to be taken for granted,
paid in full and left on the gas station counter
in a pyramid of
spare change.
You don’t want to stop
for the interstate to catch up. I wrinkle my nose,
face forward
and brace for a stop light 100 miles ahead.
Can I be the steering wheel
this time?
You said you would hold me, and I’m already oxidizing,
skin browning like
an unfinished avocado half. I can be rounder for
you, hips submitting
like good wood.
Your hands
chewing on leather,
the cows chewing on brown grass blurring like fleas
in a carnivorous fog.
Two beds always
feel-emptier-than-one,
we say without mouths.
The mattress you let me keep, still steamrolled on the one
side, divetted like an epitaph
of our lives as sheet ghosts.
In the night,
I’d cement on top of you
you like loose sediment,
and you’d reshuffle yourself like sheet paper.
But in the now,
your engine is starving,
dragging along the
asphalt
like ribs on a horse.
It’s around this time
when I wish I was a chronic illness, fused to the revolving
door of your lifesource.
We drive for so long,
I forgot you stopped
and that I stepped out alone.
Hands shrinking small
in my pockets,
concaving
as time elapses into its own chest.
There are shakes,
there are headaches,
and three showers a day
to escape the sheen of dust
from being unplayed with.
I fantasize about laying on your doorstep, a package you
thought you
already returned,
and seeing what you’ll do with me.
I’ll continue to bounce back
and forth
between oceans
like a snowy plover,
anything to see
the sun set,
or blink,
or nurse a cup
of coffee.
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