Eternity in a Car Accident

Underneath piling gray slush,
ice seals the road like glass,
an unopened window to death,
spilling out to kiss

the shallow tread of my tires,
which meet the ice with no restraint
in the way their ceaseless spiraling
quickens the world

around my spinning car
as I realize the turn
from its forward progression
to twisted disregard

of the steering wheel I grip,
a faulty control on my life,
that, when I pull to set it straight,
only drifts further

into a memory of your flushed neck
pulsing against my cheek,
as I gently squeezed your upper arm
and heard your laugh

as though you were beside me now,
alternating both your hands
to turn the steering wheel faster
and drive circles

into the parking lot of snow
until I'd laugh and squeal,
“Enough, Kyle! Stop the car!”
and you'd finally slow down.

Father

How would I live without your austere gaze?
Would I still scrub dishes till my skin cracked,
skip parties, studying to get all As,
spend extra hours training at the track?

No longer dodging the slaps to my face
or crying as I pound my room's locked door.
Not being called a “worthless waste of space,”
would my youth's laughter finally be restored?

Now it's been three years since I moved away.
I run each day, wear make-up and perfume.
I tear up any tests below an A.
Sometimes I cry inside my locked bathroom.

I'd always thought you were the one I blamed
and never saw you were who I became.

Parallel

In a shard of the mirror I have seen the face I will never forget.
I have dissolved into a million particles while the shell remains intact.
I will be demolished to return to you, to erase all I have lacked,
to be pulled into the transient space of the moment that we met.

Now the blood in my veins detains me, weighing me like chains of ice.
I lost my will; my heart is pounding ribs for another breath.
But I am tired of pretending when I need more than life and death.
A wilted blossom of useless hope is never going to suffice.

Hate is not enough to avenge all the dreams I have watched you burn.
You are a secret producing, nourishing my desire to be more than flesh,
and my disgust to discover I am only so much less.
Something basic, like the dust to which we all return.

Leave me here to destroy the world you claim to love,
to be creation and destruction of this enigma from above.

Winter in Guernica

The same beats start it off.

On my thirty-seventh birthday,
I could feel the seasons changing.
Houses strained against the brutal thrust
of a wind that stripped the world of green.
I felt the bare wood splinter against my touch
as though only to obliterate you from my mind.
Tarnished gutters choked on the last autumn rain,
until I relinquished my hope with the dying of day.
That night, all color was silently washed away.

When I found you the following week at El Árbol,
you said, “The ideas of the world are changing,”
and yours were changing with them.
We parted dispassionately beneath the oak
as the last of its leaves shivered from their branches.
The leaves never again graced that tree
and neither did we.

Last night a dove flew to my windowsill.
I suspected my sign of resurrection,
but its beak merely stole the life of a moth.
The body descended to rest on the cold barren clay
as wings and ideas slowly blew away.

In this manner, I am extinguished.
As you burn on like a Luftwaffe incendiary
in those crowded streets of fear and anguish.
Through twisted forms and shades of gray,
I might catch a glimpse of you from my window,
y olvidar, no puedo.