- It’s us, in a car. Half-human, half-endemic.
- It’s the heat waving above the highway, a wall of ghosts fudging the horizon.
- It’s the lane stripes. Half-detached and loose, dead snakes.
- It’s us again. As if off to a new life, ballistic.
Lit cigarettes thrown in gasoline puddles, the haste of it. - It’s the desert, the sun biting stones, flipping them on their backs.
- It’s the wind’s dry oof that pushes back. A warning, of course.
- It’s the flattened animals we drive over once more.
They didn’t make it far either, did they? - It’s the broken doors, roofless shacks, rust and wheel-less cars,
the meager cows drooling to themselves. - It’s the windshield wiper’s moan through sticky dirt, waterless.
- It’s our roots, still earth-moisted, dangling out the car windows.
- It’s the caws scraping the air that override the radio songs.
- It’s the proud infertility of the craquelure roadside.
- It’s the gas stations, the muzak in them. The two cheap ice creams we buy,
the small machine keeping wrinkled hot dogs rotating and warm. - It’s the roadkill smell leaking into our daydreams. Wakes us up, makes us glow briefly
as we’re being pulled back into this atmosphere. - It’s the fatiguing love. Our hearts
pulsating like a finger caught in a door.
Konstantinos Patrinos is a writer based in Berlin, Germany. His work has appeared in RHINO Poetry, Hunger Mountain Review, Rust + Moth, Tonyon, Clackamas Literary Review, Pinyon, and others. When he’s not writing poetry, he enjoys getting punched in the face during kickboxing classes. He’s a high school teacher of political science and philosophy.