It’s hard to write poems
in the oil change bay,
White Stripes on the radio,
thin and grubby men
with their hands deep
in your engine,
the sounds of cars
rolling by behind you.
I wonder things about them,
like how much they get paid
to go in and out
of this pit in the floor every day,
about the one drinking
Monster Energy
at eight o’clock in the morning,
his black-stained fingers
slowly dipping a breadstick
into pizza sauce
as he leans under the hood.
“It’s hard to have a conversation like this,”
my husband says,
“Shhh!” I say,
“I’m writing a poem about it.”
We affix the sticker
to our windshield
and slowly roll back
out onto the street,
shafts of sunlight
cracking through
the clouds to illuminate
the way forward.
#30DaysofGoddess happens everywhere, even at the Jiffy Lube, with a prayerbook on your lap. The prompt on this day was “Illuminate.”
Later, we walked in the park and found ripe mulberries on the trees along the walkway, which we stopped to sample, just like the birds.
