by Rachael Crosbie
you drive alongside ghost skies and dead topography that wheels on and on, a bleary warping of day as stagnation, of the body filled with lead—
[which is a raw inversion of the starchedblue dark diluting you with feverish rain, spitting from the loose mouth of night.]
your hand hovers around your throat, yielding a spoiledsick feeling, the kind where you choke on nothing, a phantom nothing
[clouds so low they clamp the body of your car in fog, in the billowing and blistering
premature death of night.]
[the night summons you out of your car, moistening you with a deep iodine blue. you lend yourself to a hallucinogenic cold, your cheeks prairepale with speech spilling from your lips. you repeat things from a stretch of amnesia, until you strain to breathe. your whole body shifts toward the gravel road, so gray that it looks blue, dryheaving and seeing Peanut—at least you think it’s Peanut—draining out with you, the night dissecting the blue out of you.]
and soon, you arrive back home on autopilot, coughing up a thickwhite fog; your skin turning to wool.
*
[Rachael Crosbie (they/them) is writing poems about their cat, Peanut. Rachael has four poetry chapbooks: Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen, self-portrait as poems about bad poetry, swerve, and MIXTAPES. You can find them on Twitter @rachaelapoet posting about squishmallows, She-Ra and The Princesses of Power, and Courage the Cowardly Dog.]
PØST 