Issue
#2

March
2009 

a poem by R. Jones

A Tuesday Night in New Hampshire

I'm waiting in the Mobil parking lot;
my yuppy sedan with heated seats is parked
next to a beat up matte gray van with no windows,
it looks like it was driven through the mud for hours and then
had the shit kicked out of it by the steel-toed feet of road monsters,
and I'm staring through the front window as a guy in a yellow shirt
stands on a chair and
pretends to inventory Winstons and Camels
but I can tell that he is wondering why
my headlights are shining into his empty, cellophane wrapper store.
It's one o'clock in the morning and I was fucking asleep
until a few minutes ago, when my phone rang
and I was asked to meet him at Exit 7 off of 101
because the night is cold and salty and bare-bones lonesome, and
his ride can't take him all the way home.
His voice was thick and it sounded like there was trashy hip-hop playing
in his buddy's Honda, and I sighed but I put my coat back on
anyways.

Got on at ten, sayonara nine, eight, seven, then right at the lights, and
I'm stalling, listening half to the hot air blow into my face and half
to tryin' to reach you, must be a devil between us,
and Hey, there's a blue Civic pulling up on my left, the
two new lights through the plate glass make the guy in the yellow shirt turn
around again, but the van still sits there and doesn't say a goddamn thing
as I can see your face pressed on the window,
you're falling out of his passenger side and spilling into my half-full/
half-empty automobile, I don't wait for the door to latch before
I slap it into reverse and you don't wait to become a crumpled heap
before the tires leave the parking lot, doubled over
and dripping onto the upholstery. The night is flying past
at eighty-five, and I am rehearsing
my speech.

You are blowing back and forth like the stupid New England foliage
in the last days of October,
closed eyes, shoulders to your knees, trying to touch my hip
in our bed
but the Ketel One oozing from your fingers burns my skin and I
throw your limbs off of me and say, Hey--
you've got to be kidding me
And I don't know how you even found the furniture but
when I wake up
you are sleeping on the couch
And when I brush my teeth and put on my high heels and
rattle my car keys and there you are, still curled up
in a proverbial puddle of screwdrivers,
I pull out of the parking lot,
thinking that disappointment tastes a little different in the daylight,
I keep rehearsing my speech.

© R. Jones

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