driving lessons

Emma Chan

your hands flicker into tailspin and i need to hold / the ear of plastic above my door / as you speed into
the turn / tires leaving / a history of our touch on the interstate pavement / see / neither of us know
how to drive / neither of us know to read the road / signs, exits and entrances signaled and slipping /
into past tense / both of us know the formula for hesitancy / start with the sum of forces / friction,
gravity, your fingers fisted into my hair / divide by the change in time, each breath / a tripwire into the
next / shadows of a future without / each other stretched into fractions / subtract the knowledge that
neither of us / will ever be good / enough to know more / than what we take for ourselves / than what
we lay / waste to in the weak winter light: the engine, a snarl / of bass in our driving song i barely
remember / the lyrics to / your thumbs against the steering wheel a slow snap of snare / singers with
smoke-slick voices sluicing silence / from our veins and replacing it with the memory of cold-gnawed
half-light / our wheels hurtling towards yellow traffic lights / flickering into an expired dream / the
moon an early smile in the tangle of a cloud-covered night / how our feet become wayward animals / in
the quiet between songs / how we have spent / so long wishing for this sickening / velocity that we
forgot to want / to stay / to resist the desire / to hurtle into static, a place where sound cannot / reach /
for my hand / the sky a wound in your eyes as you pull / into a parking lot, the space / between our
bodies an illusion / the echo between your lips a vase / for flowers that will never grow / the heat-laden
thrum / of ignition beneath our fingertips a / forever we are trying so desperately to keep

---

Emma Chan loves poetry, pictures of cats, and pastries, though not necessarily in that order. Her work is published or forthcoming from Diode, Half Mystic, and the depths of her Google Drive.

---