Motion Sickness
We spiral across the turnpike, a blur of hands and gasoline. I can’t hold onto
the steering wheel, onto all of these abstract ideas so early in this poem.
Mother Mary taps my shoulder and asks if I would consider using the word
“motor oil” instead. We’re throwing up and it’s like
we’re kids again. Our roadmap folds into a fan and shoots into the puck-
ered eye of a toll booth worker. He squawks, collapsing like a Great Stork.
At home, his kids flop around in the mud. Birds in oil. They garble like
salmon-hungry hounds. A falling such and such. Mother Mary asks if I got
lazy here. Even if
I could talk about myself without using my name—Instead: You take off
your shirt and say something mean. Farmed flesh. Rivers of legs. It’s so hard
to look at you when you are so hungry. A jewel falls into my mouth. I taste
nothing. You hold me in your mouth. You say I taste nothing.
Between bodies there are pages of poems dedicated to my queer shame. In a
perfect world, you take the wheel. In a perfect world, I don’t flinch when we
hit water.
Mitchell Angelo is a creative writing major at SUNY Purchase College, and the managing editor of Gutter Mag. His work has previously appeared in Gandy Dancer, Paintbucket.page, and The Westchester Review. His microwave is haunted.