Triage

by Adrian Blevins

Each time I fly I look a little longer out the window, so that’s good, that’s maybe

upgraded depth perception, but who knows since I didn’t take physics

on the Smoking Block as a girl in overalls in a Mustang at the fair

sitting cross-legged in the back with a joint or a bottle or some other joy thing

illegal, alien, licked, fringed, and laced. It was Frank O’Hara. It was D.H. Lawrence.

It was Lawrence Ferlinghetti in my purse with me trekking the sweet fodder.

It was not needlepoint. It was never Einstein. It may have been Darwin

somewhere in the back of the little skull but more likely it was condoms.

More like it was a party in the hunting shack up on the parkway where we went to fuck

because it was fucking because it was forgetting because it was rural America on drugs in the 70’s

and not me or about me by any means but just another way of not dying on the spot

as in a last ditch effort or a tryout or a rabbit hutch with a ragged hole to jump swift

and brutal out of—just a country way of being urban when all we really had

was just a rope and a goat and a feral but ramshackle old heart, that sick antelope.