Abstract
Unbroken
How do you say to someone who thinks that you are muscle, straight shoulders, steeped in the salt and sugar of women before you, that you learned not to cry when your father made you clutch the railing of your bunk bed. Your hands gripping against leather belt striking with a blurring mill of spinning licks, but you won't whimper, sniff, or crack. Your face stays dry, an unbroken cloud that you pray will not rain on any children when your hands accept the creases of adulthood and preside over the weight of reprimand, swinging its past over your lilting voice, your please-thank you, your plea for calm when there are more welts that you will encounter, hopefully not often, or your own.
The Town of Trailing Cars
Trailing Cars is one of those towns
that people know well, but never
admit they’ve been tourists there.
The deflated milky heads of condoms
stare up at you from sidewalks.
The girls wear heels angled 3 inches
beneath their souls so they never cringe
at the drifting hum of cars or the ones
that catch their breath. They welcome
air punctured by whiskey, prices and too
loud radios. Cacophony pleads for broken
countrysides of thighs, swells of keloid.
The inhabitants of Trailing Cars
expect that this is how it is,
how it will always be, blinking
into headlights and sweaty hair.
The drivers love the easy smooth roads
and the surprisingly tight turns. No
mothers live here, no sisters nor daughters.
Innocence left for Vegas a long time ago.