Kimmy Is Crying
Kimmy Is Crying
Jan Becker
I.
Kimmy is crying
Next to me in the
Passenger seat because
My eyes are tired and the
Wheels have strayed
Past the center line.
II.
I know I have opened something
Kept buried in her chest
Of treasures.
This memory, a dark violent pixie
Come to haunt us once again on the road
From a Dylan and Dead show
Where we lost one another in the crowd.
I find her bent over with a headache
By the van
III.
We give her some Goody’s Powders
And a nap under the Navajo blanket
in the backseat.
I looked so hard for you. She says.
I don’t tell her that I didn’t look for her.
Eight hours and a bottle of wine later
I’d been busy, so crowded on the hillside
Overlooking the Ferris wheel,
That I had lost my eyesight.
Eyes don’t matter when young dancing
Sweaty bodies trying to pass in the crowd
Mistake their bodies for mine.
In that case, I lose my outer eyes
And open inner ones
While the dead all around me skeleton dance
To the shining technicolor movie
In their skulls.
I had figured I would find her dancing and sweating
Passing by me in the crowd
And I would hug her
Until I could feel her pulse racing with mine.
My sister.
IV.
Instead I am now completely stone sober.
I swear it.
I could walk a straight line for a policeman.
Instead we are all sober
And she is crying because she
Thinks I am going to kill her.
V.
I’ve a feeling of the memory she has found.
We like to think we have erased them
But we wear them like new wrinkles
We are just discovering.
VI.
This one is a tumbleweed that rolls across a California
Desert highway.
I am eleven years old in
The backseat of the new silver Mazda
Danny, my brother,
Won’t stop touching me
And Kimmy is crying again
On Dad’s lap.
Mom is racing towards Iowa
Like she might reach it today
Even though we have only just left Los Angeles
And my first memory of smog.
VII.
If I could go back to the moment just after it happened
I would not remain silent again.
I would leap like a leopardess protecting her child
And gouge his eyes out with my talons.
I would kill him although he is dead now,
Because sometimes even the buried can
Never be dead enough.
VIII.
He has taken her gasping with sobs
And hung her out the window like a rag-doll
All her newborn eyes can see is heat-shimmering asphalt
Streaking beneath her at
One hundred miles per hour.
I was quiet then,
There is no sound that could contain the terror.
Of the California Desert wind
Ripping through her red hair.
IX..
It might be more than that.
At least that day he was sober.
An infrequent occurrence back then
There might be other roads she rode over
With him.
Where Jack Daniels was driving and
Dad was in the passenger seat of a car
Fueled by Tennessee Old No. 7.