Sharon Kubasak

Drive-in Double Dare
August 23, 2016 Kubasak Sharon

Drive-in Double Dare

after Deborah Luster’s Rosesucker Retablo, III

 

In gravel dust and starlight, after the hummingbirds fell

in a necklace of two weights, there is no squinting here

 

in surround sound, in static at knife point,

or at least the broken branch written against the sky:

 

steeples and refuse, disconcerting signs—deer crossing,

ice—of the rides home. The woman is not distracted.

 

Her eyes molt, she licks the trembled feathers

still moistening her lips. The microphone, in profile,

 

howls, last cry of the first death, scene

collapsing my inner ear with night crawl.

 

Rote memory is the error of your salvation.

Kiln-dry in a small crack, testament breaching

 

the windshield. Whistle through not a whistle, song

to beguile the hummingbirds from her breasts—

 

rupture of bone, unknown; tools of relic weed, given;

and this the holier endeavor than the sulfurous jigsaw air

 

I Spy in the side mirror, I sing, in the breath

of the steelplant I sing, retracting the tailfin etchings,

 

ballast of blazing tongues, and their duplicate lifting heads,

miniscule pestle of breeze. The birds lullaby and they flense.

Sharon Kubasak’s poetry has been published in Field, The Bitter Oleander, Verse, and numerous journals. She teaches at Baldwin Wallace University. Deborah Luster’s retablo appears on the cover of C. D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining.