Aaron Coleman

Interstate

I'm interested in the woman of color working
at this gas station in the middle-of-nowhere Illinois.
The middle of nowhere for someone like me, who
won't ever know her, who won't ever see into the middle
of this place I'm standing. There is something about
how she holds what looks like her exhaustion, how
she is barely elevated behind glass in Shell red,

the only other brown body I've seen driving north and east
in an evening’s hours. Her eyes. How she doesn’t look at me.
To be alive and black surrounded by such isolated white
is now an antique brutality, a traditional form
of American chaos. I know there must be more
beautiful complication here, that I will always only see
what I want and don't want to see. A different alone,

I’m beginning to believe what I am. Here: there are remnants
of idle names and newcomers and dying,
like everywhere I could ever go. Our hands touch when
she slides change down into a metal gully, into mine.
The hurt is slow. It's time for me to forget, but I only replace
what is happening to us with a loneliness
that moves through, that keeps me going.

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photo by Marcus Jackson

Aaron Coleman is the author of St. Trigger, which won the 2015 Button Poetry Chapbook Prize, and Threat Come Close (Four Way Books, 2018). A Fulbright Scholar and Cave Canem Fellow, Aaron is currently a PhD student in Washington University in St. Louis’ Comparative Literature Program’s International Writers Track.