two pieces
.
the fabric around the gear shift came out in two pieces
now sitting beside the cup holder rosary sticky
leather tongues triangular teeth on each side to keep
them hooked where they should still be if not
for me and my need
here in the strip mall dentist’s parking lot
my need to see what was there
there in the gear box
what would let me choose to leave this place
go to work
go to service
go to never moving from this spot
some better version of me removes itself to the backseat tries to remind me
i don’t own this car
that returning home i’ll have to come up with a story for sarah
about why the inner workings of the transmission
are now exposed to this hot panic
yes i said i will
i let the windows mist themselves a curtain
i let myself alone to excavate
but with the taste of latex fingers
still ghosts in my mouth
it takes an angry kind of good fortune
to be alone the way i want to now
the gift of it presses a drill to the bone asks will we know
what’s inside when we replace the rot
how many times
will i be told i am coming apart
in all the most extravagant ways
always blood budgets
for more blood
Matt’s Wild
.
My neighbors cleared out
a patch of tomato plants
this week. Rolled them to the curb—
tangled like a ball of holiday lights,
a few orange-yellow fruits still unaware
they’re no longer tethered
to the earth. It’s the scrubby kind of plant
my mother calls a volunteer,
meaning it’ll come back year after
year without being asked.
I know their name— the hundreds
I’ve harvested with finger and thumb.
They come off with just
the lightest pinch when they’re ripe.
Wait too late in the summer
and they’ll burst— sides seam
split and spilling the seeds
of next year’s crop. I learned
Matt was gone from Facebook
on the tarmac at SeaTac. Late
and alone, a long drive up
the peninsula. Catching the last
ferry home— how its lights
disturbed the misty air, how its
horn polluted the Sound. The night’s
fabric torn like sails from the mast
in a storm. Varieties of tomatoes
that haven’t yet been bred to fit
easily in a suburban garden
are called indeterminate,
meaning they’ll just keep growing
until they’re stopped by the first
hard frost. Matt, I look for you
now at the last harvest and
find only my own noise.
Marina Greenfeld is a poet and editor from Southwest Florida and Central North Carolina. Her work has been published by or is forthcoming in Harpur Palate, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Okay Donkey, The South Carolina Review, Brooklyn Poets, and others, and she was the 2022 Product Magazine Poetry Prizewinner. Marina is currently a student in the MFA program in poetry at the University of Mississippi, where she also serves as the Poetry Editor of the Yalobusha Review.
←previous ••• next→
