Ride
Mauve-mottled mountains spear the clouds, a roller coaster of stilled bones, pastels creak in the crowing wind of the fairgrounds. Old wooden fences hold back zombies. The young ones’ eye sockets level with my charging breath. My husband holds my hand. Blood warmth. My dead cat is here, alive now, his ears frostbitten, so I take the velvet slips in my hands gently to warm them up, sweet kitten. They warm up. I wake up. The slatted wood a hiding place, ants crawling spaces where sleep falls away, a car pulls in, headlights broad as childhood. The groundwood disintegrates soft under my feet. My feet disintegrate soft into the ground. My old drug-dealer sex hookup waits in his pink convertible, moving new shit, that superdangerous stuff that makes you an exoskeleton if you take too much. I can see him from inside while we talk on the phone, discuss what I will wear. He starts on about his gun and I remember when he first tipped his backpack over my bed and it tumbled out and my belly constricted. I’m not ready, I tell him to go on ahead. My husband drops me at the theatre. I walk over to the pink convertible, get in the car. We rev and roll, a beach clotting the air with sand. A surf, shooting blue plumes into the sun. The horizon is a cliff. I say, stop.
Margo LaPierre is an award-winning queer, bipolar Canadian poet, editor, and author of Washing Off the Raccoon Eyes (Guernica Editions, 2017). She is Arc Poetry Magazine’s newsletter editor and member of poetry collective VII. Her work has been published in Room, Arc, filling Station, CAROUSEL, carte blanche, PRISM, and others. Find her on Twitter @margolapierre.
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