by Michael Dwayne Smith
Big Adventure
Good morning. We are everything. So glad you could join us for it all—the hawk like a stone dropping on a mouse, the lover like a leaf looking for a sun, the city like a skeleton clacking through a doorway, the newspaper soaking like a corpse in a sprinkler. The glossolalia of impossible colors. Good morning. You slept through it all. In your sleep, we built a ship from the sand in your eyes. We went sailing behind collapsing stars. Good night. It was a very big adventure. Wish you could have been a part of it all.
***
On Route 66
Rearing blue & pink neon stallion flickers from a filling station to a motel window—
whiskey’d young woman leaning into shadow
of a man against a closed door, second story room.
At 12, one day he found the rotting carcass of a raven in an alfalfa field he was crossing,
& lit a cigarette he’d stolen from his father, & burned out the mottled eyes, one at a time.
At 14, she slipped the house at midnight with a silver bottle of her father’s best tequila,
& met a man stalking gravel streets, & stole a friend’s Impala, then ditched it roadside.
If they had names for who they are in the crowded black, who knows if they’d use them?
They’re dull sensation, dirty faces, notorious curves & pushes in lost haunch weekends,
kicking up to buck a junk-riddled past, their deadly kisses feeding a frantic animal …
& the violence of ecstasy throws back their heads & fills their mouths,
& the gritty blue light falling on her skin in the decomposing wing-fold of sheets & how
out an open window, the scent of gasoline & weed glides like Pegasus on the August air—