The car drove backward through everything the storm pulled down. Given a landscape greatly in influenced by man, it is not surprising the contemporary world winds up paralyzed in the fixtures of debt. e car swerves between atoms according to some theory of in influence. The motion moves my body, ruptures me again. His words are healing beads rattling off every panel of the car, a loose bead for terror,
a loose bead for the grief, the car stops to rest against an upright tree. ‘I’ll find someone, I’ll find someone, I’ll find someone.’ I want to put his words in my mouth, handle them right, ‘I found someone,’ I say, as I beat back violence and rescue the young. But he’s already gone, downward
or sideways, off the edge of my vision.
A theme in my motion picture, or the motion of light, resembles the shorthand stroke for shepherd, sheep herd, and to add an untied crook to its end might make chaperone, if done in a hurry, but it’s not right the straw dropped into the glass is cut in half by light, the broken straw the shorthand shape for light or little or littittle, the string tied around my wrist running down the backseat, pointing to
the water below.
Thomas Mowe lives and writes in Portland, OR. His work has appeared in Big Big Wednesday, Black Clock, Columbia Poetry Review, Conduit, Elephant, Gobshite Quarterly, Tammy, With + Stand, among others, and his first chapbook is Michael, Move In With Me (Bedouin Books). His most recent work explores the potential for shorthand to become a double or mirror of the text.
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