The Periodic Table of Car Crashes


in the heat, the temporary classrooms ping like empty oil drums
everyone's getting their learner's permit this year

how to doodle a black stallion using three different pens:
movies of people crashing and slides of what happens when people crash

this is called "distracted driving"

what a lightbulb feels like when it touches your wrist

the sounds the starving stray makes as you feed it your cheeseburger
on the back porch

this is what happens when you slam on the brakes

stolen Pabst in our thermoses at lunch, practicing how to
hold a cigarette, strategies for keeping our dads' hands off us

this is what happens when you don't signal

babysitting the neighbor's dog, watching it slip into the pool

this is what happens when you don't check the rearview

the last day of class we all sign a card for the teacher:
I'm not as think as you drunk I am

the bruises his sharp hips left on your thighs

this is what happens when you turn left against the light

the final quiz, multiple choice, ten questions:
writing, wish you were here
wish you were here
wish you were here
wish you were here
wish you were here
wish you were here
wish you were here
wish you were here
wish you were here
wish you were here

from The Handmade Castle

Section 1. (instead of breaking their hands, one after the other, while someone tries to reach for the phone)

Tonight you make up a father, an ordinary, sad one, smarter than anyone realizes, who reads the history of the Quarter Horse over and over again, making pencil marks in the margins, who drives his 80's Toyota slower now, since his left eye got so bad; tonight it is this father who calls you, this father whose smoke-stained voice you hear by the window as pink light leaks from the satellite dishes cupped like ears towards the grimy sky, this father who sounds distracted, who pauses until you say hello again and this father who coughs twice as he tells you about the plane crashing, about the girl he can't remove from the wall.