Sometimes while driving,
the windshield smeared
with late afternoon light,
I remember my body,
how it shook involuntarily
the way rain convulses
above a parking lot
whenever I was touched.
My sister chooses
songs, not for their rhythm
but emotion, hands palming
asterisks to her back,
dancing as if underwater
to music that makes
men feel less finite as they
watch her translate words
into gesture, legs lacquered
under black lights, mimicking
opiate and bruised mouths.
There isn’t a place I’ve slept
without carving her initials,
sometimes confusing
the syllables of our name.
What I mean to say is
every wreckage keeps something
of the body, particles boosted
from a dream, the white hatchback
in another city guarding gristle
of my twenty-year old skin,
plastered and begging
for a black out, to be anonymous
as a body numinous
and drenched in blue light,
dancing slow enough
to dissolve, to become
beautiful again.
Kendra DeColo is the author of Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia Books, 2014), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She has received fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.