“we struck/each other so often, too often,/like astronauts/scraping for the last flight/back to earth”
It’s dark outside the car,
even with our headlights beaming,
and the night air smells like a carnivore
clunking its way
through the fields
of reptilian green corn stalks
which stand too close
to the side of the roads
we drive to get home from church.
How dark was it
within us
that we struck
each other so often,
too often,
like astronauts
scraping for the last flight
back to earth
from the mute heavens,
without knowledge
of what was really happening
with each other.
Your shots flew like barbed broadheads
across the no-fly zone
every couple has between them.
I dispatched a rocket fricative
you’d hate yet was all I had
for all I could not say.
You hit the brakes.
“Get out.”
“No.”
“No one curses at me.”
“It’s not at you.”
“Fine. Then I’ll walk.”
But the darkness outside
Crouched ready to consume
One or both of us.
“Don’t walk.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.”
We drove home,
itself a pock-marked terrain,
Empty as the moon
We were lonely.
We were without
the vocabulary for life.
Before we called it a night, you said,
“No curse words, please. Not like that.”
“Alright. Alright.”
Yet silently I pitched paragraphs
cemented thick with such words
at you and at me and at God whom I didn’t hear.
Mark Botts lives and teaches in West Virginia. His work can be found at Front Porch Republic and Voegelin View.
