Songs I Had in the Queue from the Night Before
Begin playing as I leave a little late for work—
my girlfriend getting in the shower,
crying minutes ago, feeling overwhelmed.
The first song is a wordless tune about love
which I consider skipping as I coast down
Charleston Blvd. when a man and woman
too young, too clean, dart across the street from a 7-11.
I realize they are within use-by-date runaways,
as they stand stopped on the thin median.
He is stiff, incased by a thousand-yard stare.
She is animated, screaming behind big dark glasses.
When I pass them (close as lips on a fist),
the man throws himself into the truck behind me,
thudding against the driver side door as Patsy Cline wails:
I'm crazy for trying - getting up the man runs to the next lane
whhaap! He rolls head on the hood, body on the roof
of a mid-nineties Civic, lands on his feet,
stumbles into a waiting bus, bounces off and back
out into the lanes he’s already crossed
where a Jeep clips him at the hip, and he spins
until kinetically zeroed down to the hot asphalt. The woman
still screaming, never stopped screaming. The cars halted.
I can see cellphoned silhouettes behind steering wheels,
motionless as children of divorce about to snap
from a steep anger that circulates our inner world (still screaming).
The scene behind me now growing smaller at 10 mph.
And I don’t want to stop anymore at red lights.
I can feel it like an engine block making love to a wall.
Like an airbag to my heart, how at times the moment
is absurdly more than the mind can afford.
To go back is painful, forward might destroy you.
Try I hear Otis posit, Try a little tenderness.
I’m afraid, haven been given so little,
thinking what could I offer. But there’s got to be
something better than excuses of nothing & let be.
I pull to the side of the road. I’m getting out.
We’ve got to try.
Andrew Romanelli was born and raised in Las Vegas. His first poetry collection Rotgut (Zeitgeist Press) was published in 2022 and his chapbook Supermarket Poems in 2023. He can be found @downcharleston.
All photos by Emily Ajir.
@emilyajir