Bumper Sticker by Marc McKee

My other car is a felled tree / sit

down:  My other car is the American experiment, scabbed over

in war paint, one leg almost completely severed above the knee,

my other car is a ratchet hatchet and a wet piece of paper

in a canoe half put to sea,

my other car is a helmet I found

while in this car there is a lot of sitting, there is much arriving

by getting around,

my other car is not getting there, showing up asleep, carrying the wrong

bucket,

my other car is coughing up faded receipts nearly gone

to dust,

my other car is never enough,

my other car is a sports team,

my other car is sideways and bent over at a slow scuttle through orange

turbulence,

my other car is a drive-in movie theater burned to the ground

in twilight under fat snowflakes,

my other car is flying off any of several handles in basically

socks,

my other car is a bumper, a sticker, and another bumper sticker

holding them together barely, my other bumper sticker

you think says COEXIST cutely until you get close enough to see

it says COAXIAL so you know my other bumper sticker

is a newspaper that pays robots and ghosts

based on data gleaned from turnstiles,

my other car is this car with a magnet moustache,

my other car is a day old pancake,

my other car is a movie,

my other car is no stars on a blacktop back road on a 97 degree night,

spooked back behind the tree line by every pair of headlights,

my other car is a model fighter jet obscuring the controls

of a decommissioned fighter jet, ignored by all

but tumbleweeds and dumb sunlight,

my other car is a wig,

my other car is a red solo cup beside another red solo cup upon which

much depends,

my other car is millet cake hung from a tree for the starving birds,

my other car is never gonna get it never gonna get it, never gonna get it

never gonna get it, never gonna get it never gonna get it, never

gonna get it—wha whoa whoa whoa-oh-o-oh,

my other car is the memory of a deliciousness,

and this car I cannot tell you about truly,

but my other car is a bear running down a mountain to an I-Max screen

showing a better fitter bear running down a mountain,

my other car is it’s the medicine that’s killing us,

my other car is the howl the wind makes as two riders are approaching, the wind

wearing such a pair of bearded spectacles,

my other car is the call I don’t make to each friend who needs help

I have no means to provide, no it’s not an excuse,

this car my car look at this car it’s barely a vehicle

unsure of its tenor, but still

my other car has this Zbigniew Herbert poem knocking on its heart

like a comet with a furious bouquet of feathers hammered

into its tail,

it may be a bed this car may be a wounded carriage, it may be a dream

I won’t let go of but I’m steering it toward you

I am coming to get you in this vessel my vehicle

I am coming to pick you up

Marc McKee is the author of What Apocalypse?, Fuse, and Bewilderness. His collections Consolationeer (2017) and Meta Meta Make-Belief (forthcoming 2019) are with Black Lawrence Press. He teaches at MU in Columbia, Missouri where he lives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray, and their son, Harold.