Driving

(I thought fuck it, I may as well write prose.
I was walking again and that was what
I truly wanted. It wasn’t poetry or prose,
it was fucking self-indulgence thinking race
existed in your family in any other form
but accident. I folded up my tent and left.

There were people with cruelty in their eyes.
They hovered in phone booths, staring.
My red-haired lover with long naked legs
he had spotted on our way into the café.
He was a big guy with red hair of his own.
He was two of me if you can imagine that!

We ate and left and drove on to the border
between Texas and Arkansas and on north
all the way to Tulsa. Geneva put us up
on North Santa Fe Street, where Jess died.
She was still talking about his cancer,
how they’d just married and there it was.

The man with red-rimmed eyes and whisky
on his breath walked slowly yet steadily
to the car to tell us how to find Wilburton.
I could feel my cock still wet from her cunt.
She was sleeping. He was smiling. I put
my hands over my eyes to keep the sun out.

There were flies circling the cornbread.
Carmen said we may as well eat we came
this far without eating, and did we have
a place to stay tonight? I said, Grandma’s.
She said, Drusilla died. I said, That’s why
I need to sleep there, to remember her life.)

(13 October 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander