if it’s a good or a bad thing I never know –
what rushes down my hill’s salt-buckled street is
coming for me, at any rate. Heard before seen
before I brace for a revving past American elms.
I’m here for my bus ride, I’m nine let’s say, and
a dozen other scenarios–maybe crushing grape
Crush cans exhumed from the shoulder ravine into
viable soccer pucks, and breathless, I surveil ahead:
a mean machine bolting forth, on rickety chassis, in
filmy canary. I could use some new shocks too. I
could use a body man, a traffic jam, an airworthy
outfit like the ravens’, whose warning caws, whether
friendly or no, depend on what I can’t say. I score a
goal by lending the metal kneecap topspin. I polish off
my Stephen King on the way, cross my legs upon off-
-green vinyl, the back of my skull receiving the potholes’
morse code is pleasant and when they ask, I believe he’s cool
but needs buckets more blood and guts because now I’m
an expert, I know, no one else reads, but when they speak
of me I wish for a seatbelt, stress free biology drills, cut
power on a bright fall recess camouflaged to cloak its pits
and pocks, suppose I’m still young or dumb enough to claim
I am on-sides, not alone–the ravens are with me, they call
themselves crows, they never need a lift, would you believe it?
Tariq Shah is the author of Whiteout Conditions (Two Dollar Radio, 2020). A Best of the Net award nominee, recent work appears in or is forthcoming from Pleiades Magazine, Electric Literature, Joyland Magazine, Prelude, Diagram, jubilat, Heavy Feather Review, and New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims Anthology edited by Kazim Ali (Red Hen Press, Nov 2021). A former peace corps volunteer in Mozambique, Tariq was born in Illinois and now lives in Brooklyn, NY.