The Summer My Blood Flowed for The First Time

By Rivka Clifton

I kept having dreams about car crashes.

I’m with John and I drive us off a cliff—

the vehicle spins in midair as the sycamores

brush their tops against the car’s undersides.

John is tiny. He holds his legs

to his chest as we brace for impact.

It never comes.

The moon is bright

as the watch I once saw

*

glinting in a creek after a fix. I feel

like this is heaven—the moment

before crying, when I know

death is somewhere near and so elsewhere.

John and I seated and staring at each other,

waiting for our metal cage

to crumple in on us. I reach

out, but John is very far away.

                        In another

dream, I am alone—at last—

tilting my head back and dying.

*

My brain’s tiny camera zooms out. My car

kisses the concrete median over and over.

Erratic is not a word I would use.

                        It is smooth

like a step a dancer’s taken so often,

she knows which muscles to tense

so it looks like a struggle, or

she accepts the stepping is

a struggle.

Then all the streetlights turn off

and what was visible remains visible.

*

I love this dream most of all

for its music—the grinding

steel, snapped plastic, the spidered

                                    glass, even the paint

ripping off in chips. And somehow

                                    I know my hair is done

and my outfit is stunning.

I know when I come to

a complete halt, I will be

                                    a dazzling corpse. I know

when the first responders arrive

they won’t need to check paperwork.

They will look at me. They will know.

About the Author

Rivka Clifton is the transfemme author of Muzzle (JackLeg Press) and Wrong Feast (Baobab Press) as well as the chapbooks: Action (Split/Lip Press), MOT and Agape (from Osmanthus Press). She has work in: Pleiades, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, and other magazines.