Route Back Home

chalk teeth grate together, relentless, like the scraping metal in your faulty brakes. but the erratic drone of your rotors keep me from crawling too far into daydreams that skip to the ending sequence where we run into a wide-shot embrace. because sometimes every minute cramped and cornered into the ink stained edges of my conscious is a blindspot of complete suffocation and maybe i just need to

get some air. the haze of summer is ripe and all i could ever want is to rest my head into its shoulder, rendered to its shallow fever until i can find a warmth to keep safe. for now, my head is tilted north through your slack-jawed window with patient wind threading into my skin and

i long to stay on this road for miles until your truck is worn down to its last huffs. because the lines between us are tattered through to the tail-end, mimicking half-split wood, fraying with a guilty conscience and i can’t tell if it will be our exit or our opening. inhale or exhale?

but just in case, i honed a fine vacancy for you hollow, but waiting, like measured breaths.

and if a home is not what you’re yearning for in the spaces between the silence

then we could disperse together, fleeing with the monarchs. or we could be perfectly unsteady like the stones lining some slender creek or we could be in the water already, face down in the flood like some shitty metaphor of waterlogged impulse. and all we can pray is that we’re submerged in the shallow (but never the depths.)

for what it’s worth, i’d scratch a split into the white lines that hoard us. i’d grip the wheel like it was a collar and run us off-road outside the borders because rattling with the dry rhythm of rugged asphalt, motion sick and wetting cracked lips is far more gentle than the metro.

— Ocean Jade, Otago Girls' High School