life on mars, or a backup escape plan

These graphics are so beautiful!

Agreed! I am so excited to read your poems and your graphics/style is lovely!

i bite my lip too hard in the waiting room
and the blood starts to taste like the sea spray
of the day i fled home. the window is down
on a car speeding over an unfamiliar highway
and i consider dissolving myself into the wind
so i never have to find the end of the road.
my professor jokes that i’m chasing comets,
the way i spring from her lab to her office
in fear of the next problem to be solved. i tell her
i'm not scared of anything here. she tells me
that's not what a real scientist would say.

i learned all about equal and opposite reactions
but i am still figuring out why my instincts scream
that i am meant to run, that every room threatens
the life i feel disconnected from (objects in motion
tend to stay in motion: is this why i cannot stop?)
i know all about impulse, it's made me a fugitive.
physics said that nothing is ever truly destroyed
and then came back to admit it lied about that.
maybe that's how the home i trusted to remain
disappeared when i turned my back on it
(electrons behave differently when observed:
i should've never glanced behind me to check.)

stars do not pause to catch their breath,
i say to my professor, as if that's my excuse
for a racing heart. she says i'm not bound to their rules.
if that's true, i may have to throw the textbook out
and start from scratch on what force governs me
if newton has no answers for me. here i am, weightless
and dangerously close to falling back into orbit. here i am,
with too many numbers in my head and still coming up short.

the horizon is farther out again tonight;
it's a horror movie in reverse, the threat creeping away
to remind you that you will never make it out.

common sense says the midwest isn't trying to kill you;
the tire-like screech of the wind suggests otherwise.
it'd be less cruel, if it didn't wait for you to hit the road first.
i don't get to decide the ending, but i could pick a direction,
try to have a tragic fate somewhere of my own choosing—
get lost in colorado, strand myself in the yukon,
die young in appalachia and get buried in an unmarked grave.

i wonder if it's possible to travel far enough
that i can go back to my own choices
and submerge them under sheet ice.
the lakes up north are the closest i can get:
i crossed state lines to leave my coast behind
and somehow carried an ocean of grief with me.
if my heart weren't still beating on pacific time
it might be possible to look up at one of those planes
and feel something other than jealousy.

there's nothing to distract you from the fact that
everyone here feels sorry for us.

i was promised stars. i claim it as a birthright,
a pittance offered in exchange for not being among them.

instead, i parse through satellites, squint through airglow
for the sky all our nightlife stole away from me
while moon-shaped neon signs boast blue from the rooftops.
in a past life, i did something wrong. i must have.
it was bad enough that my father took me aside
and apologized that i was born too late to see the milky way,
born too early to travel it myself. sometimes i forget
that my father believes in god. sometimes i forget
that i do too. it's easy to, until the engines are on
and i find myself adding extra seconds to the countdown
in hopes it can fill the void before the disaster does.

i am mostly empty space, the buzzing streetlights tell me.
i believe it, most days.

in a car that still smells like the american southwest
we pull off to the roadside just to hear the playlist
you've appropriately titled music to never look back to.
this one isn't a song i get sad to anymore, despite my efforts
to cry with you, but i tell you it is. the truth is more complicated.
if we were to turn the corner i would be fifteen and fierce again
and she'd tell you about the december when she thought
she could be the greatest teenage runaway out there.
as it is, you're stuck with a version of me who knows
she would've been better off in the end as a matchstick,
only having to burn once before it's done being used.

you are who i could've been if i'd traded my childhood keys
for the postcard you never meant to send, but took the time
to address anyway. two overachiever eldest daughters living
out of state and of their depth argue over who's going
to catch fire first: it doesn't occur to us that maybe
it's already happened. i think everything i touched today
had scorch marks left behind in patterns of pacific storm clouds.
your laugh was ashy with farewells you swallowed instead of saying.

is the plan to destroy it all again same time next friday?
somewhere in michigan, or maybe in lonely cascadia,
there is a house in flames. it's anyone's guess
on how to put it out. it's a roll of the dice
to determine if anyone wants to.