The highway goes lonely. Mad want
for hands clenched around any kind of steerable wheel.
My brother learns to drive during the Pandemic. I am the one to teach him.
I like the roads lonely, he tells me, but also: how long will it be like this? I have
no answers. I am mad want for different questions. For hands clenched around
the part of me that turns like a steerable wheel. My brother refuses to drive
with the radio loud or the windows down. The music feels like danger. The air feels
like danger. The music/air feels like
lonely. Air is mad want with different species of trees. Trees who are, for
once,
flourishing maybe? Trees who are maybe clenched with the hands of new possibilities.
My brother parallel parks between an upturned clothing-donation box and a
man that wants to be useful. My brother likes to park between a moveable and
immovable object. Kind of like traveling between past and present.
He asks: how long will the road
look like a broken bone?
The air feels like a stranger. The stranger feels like a hand clenched
on an unsteerable wheel. The Pandemic feels like an unsteerable wheel. My
brother feels like the part of me that wants to have answers.
A song comes on the radio, but I keep my brother from turning it off/down.
I don’t know what to tell him.
A.D. Lauren-Abunassar is an Arab-American writer who currently resides in New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Narrative, Cincinnati Review, Diode, Radar, and elsewhere. She was a 2020 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg finalist and the winner of the 2020 Palette Emerging Poet Contest. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.