At the end of a year, a woman in a black car
takes me away. The radio plays its static-patched songs
while she asks me where I’m going, not
where I want to go. There is a right answer,
a wrong one.
I might give her an address
that is an equation, the numbers of my name
added in a circle. I might ask how much I’d owe
for 235 trillion miles’ travel, a one-way trip
to one of those seven rocky planets
rendered artistically on the news,
a best guess.
Take me to a tidally-locked face,
some body steady and choiceless. Take me
to a place where a version of me
is the unknown weather crossing
from night to day. Outside the car window,
the snow warms to rain and becomes
sun on the road.
I don’t know the right answer.
The rearview mirror shows the back
of the driver’s head. I try to see her face,
which could be dead as the moon,
which could be a mirror, which could be
a terrible light
bending into water. No matter
which way I look, she is still turning away.
The static shushes the same verses
over and over.
Danielle Weeks received her MFA in poetry through Eastern Washington University's creative writing program, where she also served as the poetry editor for Willow Springs. Her work has been published in Cobalt Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Nashville Review, among others.
Image courtesy of Kevin Dooley