Michael Smith

And I enter a constellation of headlights
circling the city. We’re all drunk tonight
and mystified by the white lines
that cannot contain us. Some of us
are asleep. Others tailgate semis
because we love semis, those big guys
on thankless missions, hauling corrosive
chemicals and swing sets to Bangor, Maine.

Even the highway dead are among us.
They pass in flattened cars with missing
doors, still strewing chrome strips
and taillight glass, their radios loud
and endlessly scanning for the music
that will let them go. A whole family
waves at me as it passes, skulls
full of teeth that have no choice
but to grin. I get the message.

I pull off into the dreaming suburbs, kill
the engine and fall into the kind
of sleep that children fight
for good reason.

I wake cold, my hands tight on the wheel,
surrounded by kids waiting for their bus.
They stare into this car as though
it were an aquarium, and I, the last
guppy, the one who ate the others.
One boy mashes his face against the windshield
and flaps his fingers over his ears
until the merciful yellow bus
takes him and his allies away. Someone left

a lunch bucket on the curb. Batman,
Robin, all the superheroes protect it,
and still I open it, still I eat
the peanut butter and the jelly,
the one stalk of celery, the apple
and the core.

Bio

Michael Smith’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming in the following publications: Iowa Review, Seneca Review, Northwest Review, Pembroke Review, Water-Stone Review, American Writers Review, Phoebe, Atlanta Review, Blue Unicorn, Avalon Literary Review, Bicoastal Review, Synkroniciti, Blood and Bourbon, Anacapa Review, One Art, Mad Persona Magazine, among others. He is the author of Writing Dangerous Poetry and co-author of Everyday Creative Writing: Panning for Gold in The Kitchen Sink, both distributed by McGraw Hill. He is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Arizona and lives in Pomona, CA.