perhappened mag
issue 2: ROAD TRIP
in love with a man i've
idealized into a god, i drive
his science experiment
cross-country
EMMA ALEXANDROV
Love swims us upstream
and for me upstream is I-80 eastbound
at seven thirty-nine A.M., no AC and dripping,
the heat hanging around my sticky body
like my voice echoing into the present from four days back:
"But – I could deliver them!"
Them – his flowers, next to me in the sci-fi greenhouse
that's now squatting on the passenger side like a rectangular spaceship.
I imagine him jolting up from his textbook that day, years ago.
Those eyes of his, miracle-green like Earth's seas and trees
haloing the shadowed moon from behind,
must have whirled in recall –
this illness...its molecule...that plant –
then assembly – and what if... –
fixing, at last, on his vision:
I will make a garden, a factory for a cure.
The flowers themselves are unassuming,
slouching on their brown stems like shaggy dandelions,
but he showed me the labwork and the chemistry's there:
in all likelihood, the weeds I'm chauffeuring
across the country are even now building compounds
that are going to save hundreds of thousands of lives.
I have forty-three hours to go.
I blinker, I lane-change, and I wonder what he's up to:
is he nervous, imagining my little red car
crumpled, the cutting from his breakthrough wilting
in a ditch? No way in hell he trusts my driving,
given that every time it was him in the passenger seat
I'd almost run a red or rear-end somebody
because I was too busy being grateful for him,
too distracted marveling at what he said
and trying to stash each of his sentences
away in my memory like seeds before winter.
I wonder if he told me how the lab bailed on him
for shipping only because he knew I'd offer to make the trip
myself. It must be obvious how stupidly I love him,
and that's what I'd have done if I were in in his place –
but what a silly thought! The truth is that I love him
precisely because I'm not in his place. I know I shouldn't –
but I'm trying to love away my defaults, to love myself
into whichever version of me would shine the most like him.
Oh, I may be hell-lonely and less than I'd imagined by now
but hey, at least I've got my sly, silent friends to keep me company:
his genius-blooms, strapped in their glass haven in the passenger seat.
Their fuzzy heads, fringed with promise,
bop out the miles with me as we jam
our way into the history of medicine
to tune after tune off the playlist
of songs I thought their creator might like.
and for me upstream is I-80 eastbound
at seven thirty-nine A.M., no AC and dripping,
the heat hanging around my sticky body
like my voice echoing into the present from four days back:
"But – I could deliver them!"
Them – his flowers, next to me in the sci-fi greenhouse
that's now squatting on the passenger side like a rectangular spaceship.
I imagine him jolting up from his textbook that day, years ago.
Those eyes of his, miracle-green like Earth's seas and trees
haloing the shadowed moon from behind,
must have whirled in recall –
this illness...its molecule...that plant –
then assembly – and what if... –
fixing, at last, on his vision:
I will make a garden, a factory for a cure.
The flowers themselves are unassuming,
slouching on their brown stems like shaggy dandelions,
but he showed me the labwork and the chemistry's there:
in all likelihood, the weeds I'm chauffeuring
across the country are even now building compounds
that are going to save hundreds of thousands of lives.
I have forty-three hours to go.
I blinker, I lane-change, and I wonder what he's up to:
is he nervous, imagining my little red car
crumpled, the cutting from his breakthrough wilting
in a ditch? No way in hell he trusts my driving,
given that every time it was him in the passenger seat
I'd almost run a red or rear-end somebody
because I was too busy being grateful for him,
too distracted marveling at what he said
and trying to stash each of his sentences
away in my memory like seeds before winter.
I wonder if he told me how the lab bailed on him
for shipping only because he knew I'd offer to make the trip
myself. It must be obvious how stupidly I love him,
and that's what I'd have done if I were in in his place –
but what a silly thought! The truth is that I love him
precisely because I'm not in his place. I know I shouldn't –
but I'm trying to love away my defaults, to love myself
into whichever version of me would shine the most like him.
Oh, I may be hell-lonely and less than I'd imagined by now
but hey, at least I've got my sly, silent friends to keep me company:
his genius-blooms, strapped in their glass haven in the passenger seat.
Their fuzzy heads, fringed with promise,
bop out the miles with me as we jam
our way into the history of medicine
to tune after tune off the playlist
of songs I thought their creator might like.
Emma Alexandrov is keeping herself from dwelling too much on death by reading and writing poems, trying to figure out how to get computers to think, eating, and editing Windows Facing Windows Review. She's currently rooted in Atlanta, GA, Portland, OR, and Poughkeepsie, NY.