You arrived last night with the sun
slugging down on your shoulders,
steady winds that made little
headway across your slickened
curls. The motel, rank with mold
and the unwashed, suited you
fine. In your bed, still holding
the key—a real, metal key, nothing
like your fake ID—that the man
in the front the green-hatted, hunch-
backed, near-slumbering man
with the unlit American Spirit
suckled in his mouth had handed
to you with a noise that was not
unlike speech, you laid there
for at least an hour listening
to the rocking bedframe next door and
the animal yips and howls that chartered
its woody racket. There might as well
have been three of you or
seven, across the country, or just
the county, laying equally
in identical beds in identical seams
of motion thinking identically that
none of this was real. Each of you
knowing that it was. Each of you
believing more than anything
in permanence and each of you
recalling the same memory
slightly changed.…….. You were young
but not young enough. You didn’t
know why you came, in the misty-
headed night. You and all your coked-out
friends who maybe knew you or maybe
only knew you enough to bring you
there, laying in the dirt with the smoke
cantering around you like dogs, you
laughing and all of you laughing
like you knew exactly where
you were and what was going
to happen, in the weeds and the grass
and the mud, all curled into each other
like a puddle of naked flesh, sex
the furthest thing in the world, like
a tumor to take it all cell by cell,
but you weren’t so bad.
You were never so bad.
You looking up and out and maybe
seeing it first or maybe you never
saw it and no one did until it was
gone. But the flash was unlike
anything—the ecstatic heat like
the first rush of dope you watched
or remembered watching move
up your arm and over your shoulder to
your neck and to everywhere—you
could’ve lived in that light forever,
but it was gone when it came,
and there was the laughing again.
Wet tickles when it drizzled down
your leg, smoke and everything still
warm like the heat on your leg
when you kicked and it sloshed
and pricked you. When you saw it
first, or last his head shot through and
cracked like porcelain with the javelin
of smoldering oak still inside still
leaking muddy fire on your impossibly
bare legs that were so long.