Sand pressed under your fingernails,
your hands, slightly sun kissed,
curve over the steering wheel.
After tan lines from
the day have sunken in, we wait
on the red left turn arrow.
Thoughts dance along to the muffled 808s
leaking from the car next door,
old patterns resurface. We’ve renewed
our promise to destroy each other. Vapors fall from your lips,
like nicotened blueberry dry ice, and
I am chewing on the skin inside my cheek, nerve-wrecked yet patient,
finding comfort in my awareness that [wherever we are,
we are also in my bed, fitted, naked, closely along with each other,
half passed out, drifting back and forth across the border
of consciousness, our bodies bouyant, collapsed.]
We are a little afraid that the other will chicken out,
that we will scalpel our abdomens, without sutures on hand,
only to find that our insides do not match as well as
we hoped they would.
hands tightened on the leathered wheel,
your lower eyelid cannot hold the weight it carries any longer.
You are slightly smiling and I am paralyzed,
afraid to watch the irrigation of your beard.
Afraid to know that we are both gushing from the inside out.