LIMINALITY

Our headlights snake

across the Western Oregon highway,

gliding across the Dulles.

Out here, there's only two kinds

of music on the radio:

country and western.

My hair touches his shoulder in the wind.

The road signs say

Turn ahead

We sing along to songs

our parents taught us.

Turn ahead.

Steep cliff

His arm is flung around my shoulders,

a gentle weight I have come to adore.

My fingers are linked through his belt loops.

Steep cliff

PAY ATTENTION

The road twists away from us.

My voice crumples as we hit the guard rail.

Our wheels lift skyward.

The car spins, flips; the sky and riverbed fight

for supremacy.

Our headlights kick into space.

All of our clothes float around us.

My blouse blossoms

like a supernova.

The change in the cupholders form constellations

glinting in front of our eyes.

We are astronauts, coming back to earth.

When the nickel stars settle in the dust,

we hang upside down, dangling like marionettes

from our seatbelts.

We unbuckle them, fall to the ceiling

that was never meant to be a floor.

His collarbone is fractured,

the same one he broke at six years old.

My leg is crushed beneath a steering column

and a concave ceiling.

The glass is flung around the car in a perfect halo orbit.

We are freezing

in our own solar system.

And as I'm blinking in and out of consciousness,

he speaks to me in a voice that comes

from just behind my ear.

He says:

'All that has ever mattered is volume,

and if you turn up the speakers

past the point of sound,

you will hear me again.

I will whisper your name

through the cracks in the canyon rocks

and you will know that this is heaven.

Knowing that someone will always

remember your irises.

And where you hid your love letters.

And why you could never speak

in anything but short sentences.

It is not a golden escalator

or a glowing choir leading you up

into the sky.

The hand of god

will not reach down and pluck you

from your earthly shell.

No, the way to heaven is here,

in your last moments,

these last half-seconds before the soul

shivers out of your bones.

You will see the candle on your first birthday cake,

feel the brush of your father's shoulder,

smell your mother's makeup on the day she taught you.

There is a tornado in your throat

of all the things you wish you said

but didn't, couldn't.

You will hear our whispered phone calls,

our entwined I-love-you's,

and their softness will weigh down on you.

Heaven is an exhausted horse

laying down to die.

It is you and your ceiling fan conversing in whispers.

Heaven is floating to earth

in this already shattered car.

I will lie here forever

and sing to you everything

I stopped myself from saying

when we were

alive.'