What the roads did
The liminal spaces are always the most haunted.
Swing sets, railroad tracks;
the forest in your neighbor’s back yard
Where you swear something was following you. The dead only communicate in silences; you’ve
known it
since you were nine years old, known that
neon signs have answered more prayers
than God can
and more animals have died from highways than from bullet wounds.
it’s hunting season in my head again
Which means I don’t know which emptiness will unmake me. I think it’s the old one, from high school,
that time when
my headlights and your headlights touched as if
Searching for a way out,
and I am. I was, at least.
Tiptoeing through hallways by the light of my parents’ surrender,
I was ten and in a dream the Earth lost all its gravity. The only thing holding us onto the ground
was the pull of each other’s orbit, so we fell out of the sky
together, hovered in the
stratosphere where the sky turns yellow,
And in a different dream – the one I always meant to tell you about –
the roads curled up like hay rolls. We watched the ground
unmake cities the way a ghost unmakes its grave, we watched
as the gravel folded over cop cars and carnivores. If I had told you about this,
You would have asked me if that counts as roadkill,
and I would have laughed and pushed you off the swing set
just to lay down with you in the wood chips,
Cursing the emptiness that made us
as we tried to make it less empty.
SEAN GLATCH is a sophomore studying psychology at the University of Central Florida. He is the author of the chapbook Late Night Drives and the literary editor for Tongue Tied Mag. Sean's work has been featured in Rising Phoenix Press, Zig Zag Zine, and L'Éphémère Review. He has an obsession with the surreal, the uncanny, and the vaguely familiar. You can find more of his work at his blog 7-weeks.tumblr.com.