An Accidental Life
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).