Keith Montesano

And so again we're left with speculation. Luck, destiny, fortuity.

           The mouth makes its sounds, curls ever so slowly, forming

                      into horror or love, while lightning in the sky, if you're a passenger,

cannot be described, because those moments are always

           your last. It's 3 a.m. Monday morning…

Smoke from the pipe of our lungs, unreaching, shifting molecules

           to air and back

to smoke, will leave us, in the midst of this city, quietly to drown

           among our past—

suicide gun blasts through walls, our waiting and heart-stopped nerves

           then quickening,

then beginning their stretch…

Because I have waited too long to ask why we deserve this,

           it keeps pounding harder than we ever imagined. Awnings

                      have collapsed over every balcony, cars start floating

gently down the streets, and even rats nestled in the sewers

           have already drowned. But still there's no flood, no looting.

Too late to think about tomorrow, I do it anyway,

           and while I'll still be sleeping, your drive across I-95

                      I always picture, every situation different. First

a man in a car with a siren—flickering and silent—

           wearing away its dark black paint. He stops, tells you

                      to get out.

Suddenly she's bawling, tells the entire story, like you do

when your world is unfamiliar, the hazy bodies lost in black.

It takes six years for the pieces to make themselves apparent…

Bellefontaine: a town on the way to somewhere else, a place

where you run out of gas, stop to make love on a picnic table

somewhere by the wheat field—when, toward magic hour, the boy

already loaded the gun, the smell of bacon wafting outside…

10. Do grapes feel that sweet while crushing them barefoot? Should I have made love like she did—sticky, swelled, then bursting?