Focus on the Family
You’re behind a snow-capped white Hyundai Sonata with Illinois plates. It has no back right lights on the way to Monument. Belongings are piled in the back seat, you’d adopted a fallacy related to baggage.
The belief was that if someone had it on display, they were not binding it up, clean and avoidant, in their diaphragm.
Within that careening cabin
found in
the burial mound of clothing was
a plastic dresser,
a leash,
the tired and crinkled eyes of logos convening.
The car grabbed your eye through a crack in your windshield that has been tunneling
a personal Etch A Sketch plateau
and though the books you’ve been reading
say to pray for the relief of the suffering of others
you’re selfishly asking the angels
to make the glass hold through a March
of the mountain’s whim,
of flying rock, of highway shrapnel bouncing
beneath the peaks you’ve been drinking in
an effort to shrink the need of some shoulder.
The rain is freezing as it
sticks to the windshield,
still you button up, gripping the wheel
in wool lined gloves
shorn from sheep on a free range farm,
the wool received and shaped by hands that will curl and hurt
from tending to machines and stitching.
If you could choose your life partner based solely on hands,
would they be coarse?
Would they be pristine, scarred? Would you make the hands twirl in varying degrees of light
and answer a questionnaire,
a contestant,
a hand in marriage to Howard Hughes?
A palm read
an Instagram search for ideal hands,
hold the screen close to the hand you hold
in the car, the metaphor you’ve crafted
for having it together
where you could nest three bald eaglets
and their mother
in the fast food bags at the feet
of the passenger seat.
You’ll keep sliding along the interstate,
the pizza pan sounding like a propeller against
the Brita you still haven’t brought in.
You know what you were looking for,
what you were trying to guess and see
through the drift and windshield freeze,
was how you were going to be discarded.