An Accidental Life

Ellen Bihler

 

We are all together

in the car, sealed away from the weather.

In the backseat, my brother and I

eat our French fries from the bag.

The gummy rain turns to snow, midair,

The burgers in our laps forgotten

As we watch ribbons of white lace

stream down, and the black road gathers

and sews them together.

 

Her eyes deviate up and to the left

as she smacks her lips in this,

the fourth seizure

of the fourteen-hundred-seventeenth day of captivity.

She is always here; always elsewhere –

limbs rooted to the sheets and weightless in flight.

Mother, father, angels, God –

Someone always arrives or leaves;

someone always laughs or whispers.

Mired between flesh and spirit, she doesn’t care

who stays, who moves on, who grows up, who prays.

 

It appears as shadow – an absence of white –

then forms the shape of a fawn. 

Purely reflex, a slamming

on brakes and my mother’s arm extending out,

as if she could stop the car by hand.

We spin like the giant teacups at last August’s carnival,

then stop. 

My father straightens the car out; mom

makes the sign of the cross.  And for once,

my brother has nothing smartass to say.       

                                                                                                                       

They spin like giant teacups at last August’s carnival,

then hit.

She takes flight through the window and the wind

mixes snow, blood and glass together.

Just before her head hits she reaches

out her hand to their car driving off –

to the child in the back seat

who will eat her food, sleep in her bed,

live her life.

  

   


Ellen Bihler lives in New Jersey.  Her poems  have appeared in Cream City Review, Square Lake, International Poetry Review and others.  Ellen is the author of a chapbook, An Avalanche of Blue Sky (Foothills Publishing, 2004).

 

 

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