Josh Myers
I’ll Know It’s Winter When I Can’t Feel My Hands
I say bequeathed when I mean broken, as in the pebbled glass
bequeathed unto bitumen by a car crash, cast like an echo
of its past life as sand. Bequeathed unto a crow’s beak dragging
through the strewn glow like a stylus salvaging music
from shattered records, unto the pulverizing tread of semi tires,
the driver calculating how much cash the traffic’s costing him
in wasted gas. I have a firefighter friend, he says it’s mostly
overdoses, accidents, unbuckling tourniquets and peeling
faces from steering wheels. Obviously, you don’t want a fire,
but … for the longest time I envied any animal with camouflage,
be it chromatophore or mottled fur, I wanted to hide
in my integument. From crèche to caisson, catafalque
to crematorium, we swaddle bodies in a semblance of repose
but does anybody really sleep like that? Speeding between
what once were peaks in Appalachia, what now lay ragged,
halved, unraveled at the coal-seam, a rusted Armco’s all that keeps me
from careening into what’s left of the trees. I place faith
in such thin borders. The jigsaw of the fontanel amazes me,
how we survive inside tectonic drift until the fault lines fuse
then spend our lives trying to break open again. The friends
I know who’ve woken up in highway medians, heads wrapped
in sagging airbags, all say the same things: I didn’t even drink
that much and driving past you don’t realize the grass is so tall.
Josh Myers is from Heidelberg, Germany. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Passages North, Copper Nickel, Missouri Review, Washington Square Review, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Nashville with his wife and dog.