I tore a ligament trying to gut you, wheat flag smut in another neighbor’s field; they said destroy by fire. I pulled some secret bone and then went on to name it: You or some other costliness, some other form of abstinence. Sodden matches drying in the sun. And then a flash like lightning, but it was just that boy again. You will not want. What failed in all the time between, err of rising years, err of growing danger in a small tin cup, in the back of a two-toned Ford. Failed in all the side streets. When everything was quiet: before the dam had split, before the floods. How every line of pavement led to a radiance we couldn’t know, rapid dash between blinds and everything closing, what washes hands of us. What stills blue and locomotive. Locks lost and winter’s tossed east amidst the families. The ways we won’t go home. Places we won’t let in, circling hearts like fan blades. For when the ribbon shreds and splits.

The new neighbor has two hundred dogs. There’s something of a pack mentality to people in jeans. Hands wild at the wheel, I question everything but the knocking sound that means we will eventually stall. I question everything but the scan function on the radio. It brings me Mozart, then Katrina and the Waves. I used to think maybe you loved me, now baby I’m sure. Anxiety deserves expectation, and you say you wanted to be free. And you say you used to be like this, and when I ask like how you say something about blue jays sounding like monkeys screeching in trees. We stop for ice cream. You get two scoops of something with nuts. I get soft serve with that hard waxy shell. We stop for a quart of oil, a quart of milk, both of which will end up on the pavement. And you say you’re all wool and a yard wide, which is eight feet shorter than the lane where we lie side by side. Our quart of milk souring at our feet, the oil a constant drip.