1.
I had to get some gas before your funeral, not
that I really felt so enthusiastic about gas. I just
needed it, and wouldn’t you know it, cigarettes
and coffee and all the things people buy? Yes,
I saw people buying them in front of me and I
thought it felt so weird that people still need
cigarettes and coffee when you die and weird
too that their money would even work, right?
There cannot be one reason, one goddamn
reason why that should be the case, but speaking
about it now I have to remind myself it is not
like you weren’t so terribly important and alive.
2.
3:57 at the Speedway on Ironwood .
At the school after school they’re in the street
walking down the street forsaking sidewalks thin and
godlike and essential. I am trying to stick to my diet,
get home, cook my own meals, tend my own body and
they are in the street.
I wait for them to clear and they persist in walking
four abreast swaddled in backpacks and foreign fashion
and some of the girls are so beautiful and I wonder if I was
ever like any of the boys. All those other people in their other
cars honk and throw insults from their throats like handfuls of
styrofoam. They stay in the street and tell us of their flat stomachs
and good knees and lives they’ve not yet ruined.
We tell them we had life before they were ever born
that we have wisdom and we don’t say that we never
wanted any of this. Never wanted to grow old and heavy
but we never found a feasible alternative so we did it, anyway.
And now they move, slowly to the Speedway and turn as I accelerate
and tell me, we know, we know ,
we know, and I say, just don’t tell anyone,
okay?
3.
I told her the socks at a gas station
they’re really for huffing paint when
she bought socks at a gas station the socks are for
huffing paint shoelaces are for shooting junk
Chore-Boy and those little plastic roses are for
smoking crack and she said
oh, I was going to use them on my feet
4.
Comfort and welcome of blanket light,
awning fallen at the closest gas station
deep tracks in brown snow shifting before tires
the certain red configuration of low gas prices an ice machine,
the improvised ashtray atop where the thin employee in tight
black pants smokes Marlboro menthols and a tattoo s
lipping down the flat of her hip, moving her knees alternating
double time and free hand cuff-drawn tight under her breast.
Now, the twins always arriving together for slushies,
Reese's, the teenage boy at the till his body like a blade the
broken bodied man with a voice like a saw ancient, blue blurred
tattoos on papery skin who buys a pack of Cheyenne Little Cigars
and steps into deep ridges of snow, like waves in paint by
number past the shivering, smoking girl whose ride is finally here
whose ride accepts her, and leaves a wake in the thickening
fall there until the stuttering work truck, the decaffeinated cop y
yourself, on a weak willed pilgrimage to lights like stars
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