Burner Magazine: The MUSIC Issue

Black skid marks litter Highway 287.

Calm, but lonely, I consider possible causes: darting antelope running for it, Jack and Cokes with dinner, Zoned out singing to Tom Petty or Joplin.

Two miles to Colorado, a Diesel’s laid new skid marks.

I know they’re new because I see the truck on its side with cops all around.

And as I drive by I case for clues, but all I see is a pool of milk, a deputy picking up plastic containers, and a woman, shaking her head as her red hair blows like electrocution. ! !

Although I don’t know it yet, I’ll be as scared of this road as she is.

A few years later I’ll watch my Army Ranger son hurl himself out of my speeding sedan after he tells me about shooting up two children outside Kandahar.

Under Petty’s stoned warble I’ll lock up my breaks and etch my own forty-foot black tattoo on the Colorado Oklahoma line.

But this is long before that, and I can still see the whiteness of milk and windmills in my rearview.

But up ahead, more skid marks, with more to come.

If we could lay out the scabbed skids one after another, how long would the long length of fear and regret reach?

Would we feel the collective gulp, the short-lived prayer against physics?

Would you feel my forty feet, my rush to reverse, the spinning, smoking tires retracing the still-wet tracks?

And how would you know just by looking at the road that I pumped on my son’s shredded body until I crumbled under the “Welcome to Colorful Colorado” sign?