Jenny Burkholder

 
Saturday Afternoon Drive

I’m driving north on Broad Street, my sweet, sticky
kids in the backseat, my husband next to me,
online bidding for an antique photo of a train wreck.

Typical Saturday in Philadelphia—hot,
muggy, sidewalks swarming with people,
three-wheelers rumbling past. A naked

man crosses over the bridge to my left,
his body a language of swerves and voices,
silences and scribbles.

His expression is sanguine, staring straight ahead,
as if he is walking back to his kitchen
table, from where he began.

I cannot look away. Feel my own body’s
swirls and follies, scars and absences.
How, daily, I conceal it. Adorn it

to hide it. Cajole it to behave.
Drivers honk and shout out to him,
concrete offers its own history

of storms and rumbles. He keeps walking.
In the backseat my kids don’t notice.
Next week the train wreck photo

will show up at our house. We
will memorize the tiny nuts and bolts
of the accident. Sympathize with

those outside of the photo’s frame,
affected by that day’s disaster.

While In Surgery, I Meet Someone

Thick black lines callously crisscross 
my belly, snake inexpertly
around my breast. Between us
a gauzy curtain.

You talk about your teeth,
loose like wobbly chair legs,
how there’s no map for what
comes next, and I imagine
we meet in an ether
reserved for the two of us:

your teeth collapse like dominoes,
my chest a bas relief
of where my breast used to be.

All is not lost, you say,
and we look down into between
what is and what will be.

I imagine we hold hands, perch
on a lifeguard stand in summer
lean into the sky, stars as close as they will ever come.

Watch your head you say
as stars shift and jiggle,
nodding their heads yes.

Thousands of sparklers glimmer
within us. Mind the gap, you say
as if in our crossing over we
mistakenly slip through.