1. ’78 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme
He pulls the car in under the oaks. It crunches on leaves and acorns. It stops. The dashlights arc in amber numbers. Flattened needles don’t tell anything about how fast they’re going. The radio’s a static hum. It is amazing how fast their bodies can go, without moving much at all, as he holds her tight against the vinyl seat. Everything is sticky and overripe, but the scent she’ll remember is Jade, his aftershave.
I was once a girl, to be held down in a borrowed car. We walked down to the river that afternoon. The rocks were warm and brown. Striped fish darted in the clear shallows. Not thinking, we left the windows rolled up. When we got back, the car was scorching. His dad’s pipe smoke came rich and apple-sweet from the carpet and seats. Heat brings out such things.
2. Pine Lake Methodist Preschool
She, my daughter, clover in her pockets, blue plastic barrette drifting down the smooth strands of her hair, asks, Can we go to the park and swing? My daughter, girl of the roly poly bugs held gently in each closed hand. She opens her hands. She watches the jays in the myrtle. They seem to be talking to her. She sprinkles orange and gold lantana blooms in her small cooking pot and salts them with sand. She rubs her nose. What’s wrong? She won’t say. Let me see. Jays swoop in the driveway. You have to let me see. The cat lies in a drift of oak tassels, twitching his tail, flattening his ears as the birds rasp and dive. The little boy at school was mad at her. He stuffed the wadded paper in her nose. She left it in for days. I smelled the rot and pulled the wet ball out.
Somewhere on a road, an engine shushes itself. It ticks, cooling down. Pressed against the seat, someone is kissing. Someone is being kissed.
Inside the gray-barked tree, a core of dark still knows the long-nosed hood of the long-ago wreck and the chrome girl at the front of the hood who thrust herself into the wind. Her imagined leap confirms what I’m afraid of: Pain is a way to know where the body ends. The rest is air.
3. Not About Trees
Late into the fall, we walk down to the creek, my daughter and me. The cold wraps itself around our hands and feet. I learn precisely the tips of my own fingers. Each step stings against gravel banked in the pale dry sand. From this, one might extrapolate: All men are trees. All trees are black inside. (The radio came on when he was done. I remember how the tires eased their way from leaves back onto the gravel road.)
Trees are amazing: each part doing its part, carrying water, light transformed, into the lovely dark. They stand along so many miles of road, the air colder than the cold blacktop, the sky awash with stars.
4. Bedtime
My sleepy daughter sprawls across me. She holds twigs from the yard. She says the sticks are pens, are firewood, are sticks, are food, are little men.
A native of New Orleans, JoLee G. Passerini holds an MFA from the University of Alabama. She lives on Florida’s Space Coast, where she teaches writing at Eastern Florida State College. Her poems have appeared most recently in Rattle, Bellevue Literary Review, O-Dark-Thirty, DIAGRAM, Shadowplay, Boudin, and Anti-Heroin Chic.