2012

Say a girl drives up pregnant in a Civic,

windows open, looking for a spot

(a woman with her hair in a ponytail,

driving a car, looking for a place to put it)

—the man in the passenger seat smaller than she is,

especially how she sits (up) and he sits (down),

and she’s smiling, the light is with her, and the car

makes a fluting sound down there in the engine (gas)

and I feel a kind of fellowship, the feminine of that,

as she girds I guess for the big change, her first

from the look of her, so free I don’t remember

her wearing a seat belt, the man’s hand already

on the door and the feel of a belt sliding tighter

across my shoulder, the way it locks up sometimes

and you have to release the clasp and redo it, well

that’s when my mind kind of slackens and lights out

to the far future, where there are no seat belts

or only seat belts, the people eating on the street

looking elsewhere as slowly the streets dissolve into

compounds, the girls into women into doorways,

the boys into boys who wish they were boys,

and this is not a poem but a piece of cloth

with a hole in it, through which glimpse something like

a girl who drives up pregnant.

Amy Eisner teaches creative writing and literature at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Her poetry has appeared in various literary journals, including American Literary Review, Cape Rock, Confrontation, Fence, Harvard Advocate, The Journal, Louisville Review, Lullwater Review, Madison Review, New Delta Review, Nimrod, Painted Bride Quarterly, Peregrine, Permafrost, and Poet Lore.