The moon raced us along the interstate without a breath.
The map was wrong and so were my mother’s eyes;
a punched-in confidence and sharp inhale,
resignation was the cotton in your ears, banging.
You clenched your eyes shut to see the fireworks.
If only they had seen their fingers creeping over themselves:
spiders, a web of bumps, gaining purchase
and losing it as a pelican who forgets its herring is
alive: plunging stonelike, frozen in descent, into
brackish water, commemorated by feathers
and concentric ripples. They should have heard themselves:
abandoned phrases and ill-fitting words, learnt
and foreign. Irritation and a chest constricting
and gesticulations to the wheels—
kicks to the skull. Sharp beaks peck at each other,
leave dents.
Release. And the grasp of my father’s
“I missed the road,” then,
her, “I told you so.”
