Palm Reading
I didn’t have much of a life anyway,
so I dragged the jug of change
to the car and hoped it’d be enough
to save her. Shot straight through
the velvet curtain of night into the gleam
of a Virginia sun, where mosquitos
the size of my palm, floated like dandelion
fluff outside the heat soaked truck stop,
gasoline wafting from steaming asphalt.
I stood at the pump and imagined
her front door, her black and blue eye
looking out at me from the peephole.
I left my lights on in the parking lot
of a Cracker Barrel somewhere off the
highway in bumblefuck Georgia, where
no one wanted to give a girl a jump.
Laid on the hood of my car, so far
from home it could’ve been heaven.
Thought the sky looked like a movie set.
I could poke my finger through a star
and tear it away like a thinly hung veil.
I pictured her tiptoed body framed in a wood
paneled living room. Shocked to see me, my car,
if it made it there, billowing smoke in the driveway.
Of course he had hit her. I felt it waiting
in the lines of his palm the moment
he clasped mine with something to prove.
But I am no knight in shining armor. I am nothing
but impulse and reckless abandon. Just another
girl, raised to see how much a body can endure.
