A Sunday Drive

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The road beside the window, dark with smoke,

grinds beside the glass, it growls, it grows.

Nothing but poles along the road to mark the time

and wires above our heads, thick with breath

and sweat and the pulse of Sunday voices.

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Your hard hands on the wheel hold tight

to some soft thought scraped from plates

then thrown with bones beside dry highways.

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We see nothing but graves rectangled with sun.

Nothing but fields and hills that slowly turn away.

Nothing but nothingness breathes and feeds

and falls across the ground to scrape beneath.

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It is too heavy, too loud, this echo of wind

when no more lights rise from the reeds,

when a baby doesn’t think of drinking bottled air,

when his thin life quickly opened, then closed

like broken breath from an empty chest.

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Outside the window, clouds swell their bellies

and trap us inside the faded white lines of a lie.

Past the point of turning back–this moment

is where we will remember our forever.

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Too numb to sleep, we will not stop the hum,

the breath, the spin of earth under wheels.

We make our way over those small bones

turned to stone, tossed like gravel, crushed

with glass on the side of an unmarked road.

Julie Buffaloe-Yoder

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