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by Kat Mulligan

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Night, the plump and spoiled tea bag,
has corrupted the water that hosts it.

The car keeled over at the brink of virgin America,
vomiting into a ditch,
torn apart like a birthday cake at a gathering of drunks.

The seatbelts, blaring like overfed veins,
pressed two corpses back into a womb of leather.

From theories of reincarnation we know
that scrap metal in time returns to a state of preciousness,
that black holes spaghettify still-thudding bodies
across their looms of stardust
until they emerge from new legs as afterbirth,
or a ballpoint pen,
or as the very thing that killed them.

And as the headlights breathed in darkness
and exhaled light in gesticulated, unanswerable prayer,
twin humanities were recycled through the throats
of animals,
how we all will come to our souls again.

It is through nights like this one that newspapers
yawn their ink into illegible oxygen,
stuffing blank pages into stands around the city
by the time morning accumulates like a beautiful rash
on the highway’s spine.
It is through nights like this one that youth,
scolded with bouquets of wagging fingers,
curls into itself like a beaten dog.

Public Works barricades the interstate with
a face full of cosmetics,
and on the highway at daybreak
decorum rolls out like a carpet.

Nothing gold can fend off the coyotes that nurse
at the mile-long breast of Jersey walls.
To the earth innocence returns.
To the earth the car returns,
skeleton sucked clean.
And the bodies that housed immature spirit
fall victim to the firmament,
renewed in spit, blood, and talc.

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