summer (birthdays/driving lessons)

The worn out backseat of your car is where I end up
when vomit piles up at the back of my throat, my head
as scratched as the hooves of a dead cow. The worn out backseat
is the best place to lie still, but you say, only when it’s dark out.
At night, when it’s too dark for us to even remember
the faces of our parents, the streetlamps
are all that remind us that we’re still in a suburban town
(anywhere else, the streetlamps wouldn’t flicker).

When I’m with you, it’s as though my head is bald again
and I’m crowning my way out from my mother’s womb for a second time.
The first time I was born, I clawed my way out like a violent rat. With you,
it’s always summer in the worst of ways: heat flashes across my palms,
my throat bitter with my teeth, your voice echoing,
"if you like arguing so much,
you should be a lawyer!" You have hair

that is too short for your lanky body. I see you
driving across bridges built for rivers. The last night of May, I dreamt about
all of us from the line of painted white houses, everybody seventeen years old,
running crookedly into an ocean. Our bodies shook with saltwater.
In the dream I cried, something like saltwater,
because nobody drowned.

I’ll never get over the age twenty-six; on your tongue,
it sounds too much like a curse, like “lawyer," or even "poet."