Member Poem

prose poem

Once the herders clear the sheep from the highway, you can proceed on your way into the coastal hills.
 
For some reason she thinks this is a precious moment. Her camera clicks and makes it indelible. And clicks twice more. Catching the backs of retreating sheep and herders against a landscape of hills covered with brown grass and yellow sage.
 
You are driving a red convertible with the top down. You can’t remember the top ever being up. You are having trouble remembering the convertible. The finger-splotched chrome of the wheel feels unfamiliar beneath your hands as you rise into the hills to negotiate sudden curves and switchbacks.
 
She tosses her burning cigarette into the wind and turns quickly, rising up on one knee in the seat. Her camera clicks, capturing a trail of sparks as they dance along the highway.
 
You conclude that someone else has driven this car for years. Its mechanical connections have conformed to the patterns of a different pair of hands from yours. Though it responds to your commands, it does so reluctantly, as if it finds your touch invasive. And each time you accelerate, there is an uncomfortable noise from the engine.
 
She regales you with a series of recurring dreams of shapeless twists and turns that she recalls in generous detail. Some of them sound as if they could be your dreams. There is nothing but static on the radio. A wailing static that competes with the engine and her voice but drowns out neither.
 
The highway transitions to a narrow road of crumbling asphalt. As it rises and falls with the land, its white dividing line, at first clear, is soon faded as a wraith. The hills that surround you part for a moment in a perfect V and the ocean appears, vanishing in the distance under a colorless sky. Her camera clicks, imprinting the gray lines of the vista. It looks far too cold to swim.
 
She observes that the sidereal hemisphere revolves like a cogwheel, that the carnivorous world beneath is immense in fire and brine, that the uninitiated must wait their turn upon the wheel.
 
Turning onto a steep downgrade, you see the beach stretched before you. From here it looks deserted. But from somewhere three orange kites rise to swim wildly against a swift sky.
 
Her camera clicks. She has taken a photo of you driving.

Appeared in The Pedestal Magazine