Winter Diary … 1/2018
I broke your heart with the back of my mind
– from a John Hiatt song
The wipers are frozen to the windshield. I chip & chip. Nothing. Ice, still falling. Mid-twenties today. Exhaust rises as I let the truck warm up. That should do it.
Inside, the fire is enough. My empty cup on the hearth begs a bit more, but two’s plenty. Down the hall, I hear the Chromatics on tv. Must be the Roadhouse. Something about shadows and last time and driving.
From the window, a few mourning doves refuse to let go their spot, huddle along the weeping cherry’s bone branches.
The world we think we know isn’t the world after all. Sometimes silence is a gift. Sometimes it’s the only say we have. But there’s the implied, the unsaid. I dreamed a séance class in Honors Hall. The teacher wanted a smoke, and said, “Walk with me.” And I did. We crossed the quad. In the dream I loved his long coat, his hands turning up the collar against the cold.
Ghosts drift the room as if a reckoning were underway, and I’m fine with that. “It has to be.” I’d eat those words if I could – their tale & plot & hurt for landscape – grind them down with my back teeth until my jaws ached, then swallow.
The cab must surely be warm by now. Weather channel says the skies should clear by tomorrow. Doesn’t matter. This road goes nowhere.
Sam Rasnake’s works have appeared in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Best of the Web 2009, Wigleaf, Spillway, The Drunken Boat, MiPOesias Companion 2012, Poets / Artists, LUMMOX 2012, BOXCAR Poetry Review Anthology 2, and Dogzplot Flash Fiction 2011. He is the author of Cinéma Vérité (A-Minor Press). Follow him on Twitter: @samrasnake.