SKY DAVIS

the road to lizzy’s

light bruises the dashboard—
soft blue spreading over the cracked vinyl.
you drive one-handed, the other
resting on the space between us.

i see a tender country forming in between,
one neither of us can claim.

outside, fields blur into themselves,
the air swollen with flies and heat.
You hum something low—an old song,
something about mercy.

we are going to see lizzy,
her new baby with his red, stunned face,
his small lungs learning how to wail.
i think of what she told me once—
that love feels like being struck,
only slower and  sweeter.

your thumb taps the steering wheel.
the rhythm finds my ribs.
i imagine the boy in Lizzy’s arms,
the milk, the sweat, the body split open
to make room for another name.

you tell me I look good in this light.
i say, light doesn’t care what it touches.
you laugh. i don’t.

the sky leans closer,
miles bleed into miles.
lizzy waits somewhere
with her baby and her healing and her hunger.
we wait too,
inside this moving wreck of steel and want,
light leaking through the windshield,
making saints out of the damned.

by the time we reach the town limits,
the world feels used up—
the way a body does
after love has run through it.
yet you reach for my hand.
i let you.

this is what tenderness does:
it opens the mouth,
and the mouth
bleeds light.