Her face is bruised, she keeps touching her nose because it feels strange, it is in the wrong place.
A tooth is untethered and she spits it to the ground.
She looks at it on the hot asphalt and thinks it looks aborted.
The sun is hot as she shambles onwards towards the shade of an overpass.
The asphalt burns through her plimsoles.
She's on the shoulder of a highway that reaches from her to the horizon in each direction, and is dissected by other highways and overpasses,
like blood vessels of a greater organism.
She feels small.
There is no room here for anything other than asphalt and concrete, nowhere to get away from the threat of engines.
Among so much metal and speed and rough concrete
she feels vulnerable in her fleshy soft pink body.
Traffic booms around her in every direction, and out of the drone she discerns a pulse.
It starts in her chest.
A broad man lumbers toward her along the shoulder of the highway, he's sweaty and covered in grease
like a mechanic.
He's wearing a peak cap with a Ferrari symbol on the front and a louche smile. She thinks
I've seen that fucking cap before.
Behind him in the shade of the overpass is a pile of limbs and a pile of car crash fuselage.
There is a sign post next to each displaying prices for every item; legs are worth five, steering columns are worth 10, arms are worth only two and so on. Gear sticks, feet, exhausts, fenders.
She thinks the car parts are worth more.
She hears a screech as a Volvo slides past her colliding with the concrete barrier almost instantaneously, carrying with it a gust of wind that touches her face and spits up dirt that stings.
She rubs her eyes. The air is thick and choking,
it burns when she draws it into her lungs, as if the pain and terror of the wrecking was sublimated by the intense heat of collision, now filling her atmosphere.
The mechanic ambles past her towards the crash scene, glass crunching underfoot.
He begins working, efficiently dismantling the wreck as though it were stage scenery. He's making two piles. He's like a spider in a web;
There's nothing left under that cap but instinct.
She feels sick. He smiles and sweats. The traffic flows on. Her nose bleeds.
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4 comments:
hey lyndall-o
i hope this person is not you. but if it is, you don't need all your teeth anyway.
hey sam pink
I still have my teeth, all originals. At least for now. I imagine some day I'll lose them, if not through a car wreck then probably through my persistent consumption of sugary foods.
hi.
this is a good car-wreck poem. If a car-wreck poem is suppose to be good...
"He begins working, efficiently dismantling the wreck as though it were stage scenery. He's making two piles. He's like a spider in a web;" <--- Favorite lines.
I liked this; it tasted like chrome. Reminds me of Steely Dan's Kamakiriad.
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