The Evening She Fell in Love with a Car, and Other Poems
The Evening She Fell in Love with a Car,
traffic sighed exhaust.
Like cigarette fog. Geysers. Winter breaths.
She discovered a desire for a moment
beyond her own. Four-door, almost
blue in the light, aluminum bonded and bent
in intimacy. Worlds carried on rubber tires.
She slipped into the Toyota stopped beside her,
where guitar strings and drum beats nestled
in leather seats, and baby feet kicked, a giggling tempo.
Yawns broke into smiles.
Everything was comfortable.
A laugh clung to each click of the signal,
warm enough to melt the frost-edged windshield.
The driver looked back, called her Lily,
mistook her for his daughter.
She tried to forget her own name.
Her car dragged her back. Silence.
Except the rustle of the paper crane, swaying
from the mirror. She stared past its wrinkled wings
at the bobbing red light, prayed for green, a change,
something to carry her on to a new street, memory,
that moment tucked away in her glove box.
A Place Occasionally Visited
People aren’t that little wooden table,
sitting in the corner of the cafe on State.
The one with the tilt that always
leaves coffee cups just a bit off-kilter.
And people aren’t that sun-stained, old chair
with the fading flower-print cushion.
The one you can barely fit in,
because it has always been a smidge too small.
And they aren’t the window either,
with its foggy panes and forgotten-meal grime.
The one that looks out at the drooping willow
tree and the bird feeder empty of wings.
People aren’t that little wooden table,
but they are underneath—if you dare to look.
They are the sticky colors coating the wood,
clinging on with muted scents.
The thing you avoid brushing against, because
they remind you that someone else has sat there too.
Paint
I’ve never met the man I dreamt about last night. But we talked a lot about the smell of paint. While I thought it smelled like headaches, he said orange paint smells like lemons. “My wife loved the color. When I bought my new home, the first thing I did was paint the dining room orange. Now I eat every day surrounded by citrus.”
The man asked me, then, about what makes me smile. I told him about the gray mourning dove. The one I almost hit (every day) on my way to work—how it nestles in a pothole on Newkirk Street and stares me down, daring me to keep driving. The man spent the rest of my dream contemplating. Before I woke up, he nodded. “Gray is a good color. It’s sturdy.”
Now it’s morning. I’m staring at beady bird eyes. And I remember. I never did tell him I changed my mind about the smell of paint: that gray really does smell like bird feathers.
Ashley Johnson resides among the Wasatch Mountains of Northern Utah where she spends her free time writing in the company of her two cats. Her work has appeared in Utah Valley University’s Touchstones Literary Journal and she is currently working on her first chapbook of poetry.