Knoxville, June 2018

On the drive through Tennessee, I imagined my car

driving over everything I love. My mother’s laugh

like an autumn breeze, my father’s hands like mountains,

my cat curled round the doorstep; ephemera of better days

piling along highway curbs. I don’t know how to grow from the past

without turning it into roadkill, and everywhere

another memory runs into the street, crouching from treetops,

hiding behind exit signs. In Chattanooga, I hit my first love,

but I made sure his eyes were untouched. In Chickamauga,

across the Georgia border, the cotton from my stuffed animals

abscessed the Appalachian hills. 

This summer,

I turned my memory into a slaughterhouse

because I was never taught to forgive. 

My car’s headlights are butcher’s knives, but somewhere beyond them, 

where the wind rustles through the bluegrass of the mountains, 

an animal that couldn’t be killed:

a pair of dirtied hands, skipping stones across a yellow lake, 

broken taillights where his eyes once sat. 

Sean Glatch is a poet located in Orlando, FL. He runs weekly poetry workshops at his university and is the literary editor for Tongue Tied Mag. Sean's work has been featured in Rising Phoenix Press, Ghost City Review, Bombus Press, and L'Ephemere Review. He has an obsession with the surreal, the uncanny, and the vaguely familiar. You can find him on twitter @seanyglatch.