This Car Will Get You Into Ontology by Matthew Schmidt

This Car Will Get You Into Ontology

Matthew Schmidt

West Texas blind in the rearview. This is how I save you: beard in the boulders, counting scrub.

You said outcrops aren’t outside where they want to be. Filling up at the station they were talking about the sun. There isn’t more than the sun you said.

When the girls cried at night, the darkness, shag carpet pacing, back patting: empty bottle a hawk creates.

Desert Snakes sign. Graveyard of rattles. The contents of your belly: cubed ice.

If I could cudgel stone into dust. If what was behind us was lost in an avalanche.

That a car could take away breath. That breath could be counted. That between our ears a seed could flower, the way the girls’ might’ve bloomed.

Matthew Schmidt is working on a PhD in English at the University of Southern Mississippi. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Hobart, Pleiades, Poetry South, The Seattle Review, and elsewhere. He is an associate poetry editor at Fairy Tale Review.

ISSUE EIGHTEEN: Say Yes, Mr. Tell | next poem →