We Always Fight in the Car.

The party will have been wonderful. It will have been great to get away.
It will have been always nice to spend some time with your parents. And then,
a block into our journey home, a note of unrest (a small, parenthetical improvable),
hardly occasion for annoyance—funny, if anything, shared for a laugh.

Turn right here: odd frozen pause, skipped beat, you mistake me, that’s not
what I meant, but we are up and running, for why shouldn’t I feel that way,
when it comes to it, merging into greater traffic, after we just spent all day
wasting another precious weekend, when I could have been—

airbags deploy, sucking all oxygen from the cabin. Attach your own mask
before helping others with theirs. We are coasting along in perfect silence.
Were the mood different, one of us, passenger, would ask the other, driver,
to slow down. As it is, speed feels like stillness, two astronauts out

on spacewalk. Were we not tethered to the same vehicle,
itself hardly stable, orbit code for always falling, we would
drift apart now. For though I can reach and touch your arm, you
wear too many layers to reach skin. And were I to reach skin, you’d

withdraw. And were I to say sorry, it would be too early. And when
I try to see things from your perspective, I see them. Fine. It matters
not. For when galled by such hideous names, how may I respond?
Punch gas? Bite tongue? Curl lip? Swallow misery? Add injury?

Thinking frightens, makes me thank God I am not man but anchor
to hang onto, weight to drag you down. Loving me, you’ll lose yourself,
you fear. I feel the same undertow. We are marooned in this immaculate
bubble. Each a choice the other cannot make. Home is not yet close.

The noise of the engine is hardly bearable. Hardly hearable,
I meant—they make everything so quiet these days.