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DRIVER'S ED
The clouds stopped their hours of bawling
all at once, a sudden digression from the calendar
with the realtor’s name and the superimposed smiling children.
All grins when it comes to buying a house in the prettiest suburb
where everyone dusts off the bones they keep in cabinets
now and then.
Maybe hides a lover’s letter doused in Chanel #5 or gasoline behind
chipped ivory figurines and Mackenzie-Childs’ manufactured whimsy.
I see the landscaping with a housefly’s vision,
Everything cut up and pasted back together like the
vase Susie precious broke but couldn’t fix—not
with the babysitter in the other room,
not with all the king’s horses and men to facilitate.
No one had words left to point out the forget-me-nots
sprawled across the damp carpet.
The rain stopped suddenly but the windshield wipers kept
swaying to the percussion of a downpour.
Grandma thrust her foot onto the brakes,
this varnished skeleton that wears vignette brooches
and flat-heeled loafers pushing with such force
I was sure we’d accelerate backwards—
Hit a wormhole and relive the moment she woke up
to find out not everyone else had.
She sat behind the wheel every now and then, tracing
stitching in leather with swollen knuckles,
inhaling new car odor gone stale and what-could-have-beens.
Her laminated mug shot at the mothballed bottom of a nylons drawer.
It was easiest.
The license tainted with waterspots that obscured her date of birth,
her record purified.
Tabula rasa
It rained that day back in -71,
when the world unconsciously splashed in puddles
and tripped over the squeaking boots little Jimmy
didn’t remove from the doorway like he
promised mom he would.
And now, twenty years after consuming
every pop-psych book on the shelf,
after swearing she’d never touch the keys she buried,
in that porcelain urn reading Home Sweet Home,
she smells that after rain musk of worm flesh and nomadic smog.
Gives in on the day on the hour on the minute to some romanticized vision.
The keys in her hands. Their shell, shattered, on the laminate floor.
At that same intersection, the red light is a haze as a drizzle begins.
Her gauzy skin glazed in salted rain, her mind moving in fragments
like the remaining splinters of a crystal vase to analyze and ignore.
She reaches for the pedals with the slicked rubber of her shoes,
watches the red haze turn to the emeralds she had dreamed about
once before. Before the drought.
But now, storybook wench, a rainbow in the rearview mirror.
- Rachel Moran
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