Poetry By Michael J Morris

       Chris Murphy CC



DRIVE 


Backroads were designed to twist,
where crop heads measure a man. 
Speed limits implied or intuited,
sometimes both. There’s only 
one flashing red stoplight 
where a town likes to hide. 
People engage in what keeps them 
hidden amongst cars that often stop. 
A bar collapses into shadows. 
A gas station where outsiders know 
their namesake.  
 
Some summer I’ll learn the route, 
the imaginative traps and shadows by heart. 
I pay mind to the houses with the most land, 
how far back houses are settled. I wonder 
what these houses hide aside from their wealth. 
 
Further down the route lies a veal farm. 
It’s impossible to miss—defining creatures 
as family business and generations decide  
whether muscles can grow. 
 
Some autumn ago, on the highway, 
I struck a deer in a clatter of hooves 
like tom toms on the hood of my car. 
The body was swept upward  
into impact. When I exited the car 
I thought of the satisfaction 
a police officer would harbor 
by getting to use his gun. 
The body ricocheted perfectly 
onto the shoulder. No cry, no pain 
just an exit. The fur entangled 
in the car’s front grill like a machine 
that wants to disguise itself as alive. 
I might have cried that night.
 
Some summer like today 
my passenger is catching a nod 
off dope that was too good and I’m 
speaking his name every five minutes 
and bumping his arm like a contact sport 
asking without asking if he was alive — oblivious 
to the love that exists in the form of elbows  
that grapple, surprise or startle. 
 
This can’t be summer 
as it doesn’t read like summer, 
It’s only fair-weather warmth as another 
creature decides its season. A vague  
celebration ingesting what makes us 
less capable, awakening as a breach or 
toying with us in a broken sleep. Some acts  
erase us as an animal’s lack of choice. 
Somewhere along the way I became 
complicit, hanging on words, lectures,  
bargaining, describing what would happen if I  
lost another person I loved. The words fall 
apart as soon as they reach the air but 
I have to say we all have a moment 
to contest our routes, if they fall  
into tangles. I refuse to erase or untangle 
these roads— chaotic, the sharp turn 
that becomes short cut or scenic as our cities 
blossom on the page, and we remember 
we are this small versus every cycle.


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​Michael J Morris is from Rochester, New York and is an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University. He is an assistant editor for Mid-American Review.