Driving on Fumes Across the Social Divide
If you’ve ever stood holding
a maxed-out credit card
in hand
after midnight
in February
at a multi-pump gas station
in Rawlins, Wyoming
and realized that you
had finally arrived
in a place
clearly not created for
nor hospitable to
human life,
you may have also
come to understand
how little your failures matter
and how the gleaming steel
that surrounds you
and the toxic fumes
you breathe
will likely endure long after
your own
small difficulty
is or isn’t resolved
and that you must
simply drive on
for as long as you possibly can.
Health Care in America
I didn’t have insurance
but couldn’t stop
the bleeding,
so a young
Urgent Care physician,
who’d recently
arrived from Bangladesh,
sewed up my forearm
without bothering
with the paperwork,
and later, when I couldn’t
afford a follow-up visit,
I found myself a pair
of needle-nosed pliers
to pull out stitches
one by one, dapping the wound
(I’d cut his knots too soon)
with the tail
of my work shirt
as a clear white fluid oozed
from the holes
those stitches left.
About the author: Michael Colonnese is the author of Sex and Death, I Suppose, a hard-boiled mystery novel, and of two prize-winning poetry collections, Temporary Agency and Double Feature.
He lives in the mountains of western North Carolina, near Asheville.