We are driving to Wichita. We aren’t speaking,
so you turned the radio on. I hate Debbie Gibson.
I crush my right ear into the headrest. It keeps me
from looking at you. It doesn’t help the music.
The car is blue. My stomach roils and spits
as the corn fields and the bean fields blur past.
I dig my fist beneath my ribcage and breathe deep:
I will not hang my head out the window like a dog.
Your mother’s house rises up from the flatland.
My hands imagine a matchbook. Unlike desert sand,
the yellow fields move but don’t move, bend
with the wind but can’t get free of the earth.
–
Kimberly Glanzman earned her M.F.A. from the University of Kentucky and now lives in the Arizona desert. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in perhappened, Puerto del Sol, Harpur Palate, Santa Clara Review, Iron Horse Literary, and Electric Lit, among others.