Montana
By Ian Powell-Palm
“I have no way, and therefore want no eyes”
-Gloucester
“Speed is killing Montana’s drivers”
-Billings Gazette
1.
White crosses: scattered across the highway:
Like puncture wounds in God’s vision: driving this state:
Is like uprooting a graveyard: like turning away from:
The woman cradling her daughter’s body: all teeth and broken wing:
as she tears her from the car: as she turns into another syllable:
God can no longer pronounce: gripping her tongue: my mother carves its meat
Into a violin: Sonata’s through her sobs for the children: these highways have changed:
Tell them that in the corners: Of this beauty lurks the bones of Toyotas: mothers with
Metal wings and children they will never meet: Tell them that my family lines these mountains:
their crosses spitting out directions to nowhere.
2.
80 down main street, the vodka bleeding
Through both our hands
She flips the car because the sirens
Have reached us too quickly
And we can already hear the interstate calling
Our names, like children,
Like it did my sister, my brother as his knees shattered
In Wisconsin, 23 and waiting,
the pickup truck crashing through him
like a father
and still you might ask, so what, kids die in metal jaws all across America
But at least Montanans acknowledge it
At least we fashion a cross from what’s left of our hands and mark
Where our bodies shattered.
When the car flipped, my sister’s body tearing like a vision
Across my eyes,
I bound my face in a white sheet,
Let the men carry me back
From sight
back from the boy mangled on the stretcher
Calling for his mother.
His body, limp
Like a prayer,
We all know we’ve heard before.
3.
Listen: down that backroad of throat was a country: on the other side of language.
I could see Marie’s body there, a slab of meat on the morgue’s metal: her breasts
Two shut eyes, purpled with knots. I tried to scream: but my voice had been crushed
Into music: That’s my city/What have you done to her?: I cried, but the women,
And the men who had once been women, held me back
All of us watching, silently, as the flames gnawed through
Every living thing in sight.
4.
That’s when I saw it.
At the end of my family’s dying was a field.
Beside its stream, mother and I prepared a fire
For our daughter’s body, her cross clenched between us
Like a chokehold. When father returns from tearing apart
Every car he can get his hands on, his fingers shredded to bone, we will fashion
a blanket from his hip and lay it down. A white sheet across
our eyes, we will bring her back to the living, our daughter’s
spirit breaking furiously into flesh. We will trace her rib,
jutting and large, let its sharpness draw blood.
We will touch our gutted eyes, wet with sun,
With our daughter’s tears. All of us
So lost in joy
We will never acknowledge
The reasons we
can’t stop
shaking