hauntology as a voicemail
Rachael Crosbie
Your car carves into another summer dusk where heat oozes like an ulcer. The road ahead swells to vertigo.
“We need to talk, Kel…”
The setting sun bleeds red ripples in clean light. You pull the visor down, but you sit so close to the wheel that it doesn’t make a difference. You’re still sunsick. You can’t think. You flick on the hazards, soft yellow headlights wading in the sunken highway.
“…about us, y’know. I’ve been in my own head for a while…”
The voicemail plays as Drew’s words sear into you. You’re burning in this skin and you peel your lips and know he won’t ever kiss you like that.
Night now stains the acid orange sun. It fevers you all the same. Steam streams from the road and fogs up the windshield.
“…wondering why I haven’t felt, why I feel so dulled…”
Static fills between each fragment. Everything you see and hear is gray and alien.
Dark drowns the only visible parts of the highway to a smooth, impenetrable mass. You swallow hard until a lump forms in the back of your throat.
“…you don’t deserve it, me like this, and I hope this isn’t sudden. I’m sorry.”
You pass another exit, driving as the hours blear to a filthy pale dawn. The dry and sandy sun scratches you, and that’s all you choose to feel as the voicemail plays again and again.
Rachael Crosbie (they/she) tweets things about She-Ra and The Princesses of Power, cats, and their fiancé. They have two poetry chapbooks: swerve and MIXTAPES. Their third poetry chapbook, self-portrait as poems about bad poetry is forthcoming later this year.