Leveler Poetry Journal
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The car right through the wall, right into the room illuminated by the light from a gnarled lamppost outside, the floor all covered in pale stones.

 

I totally just run away from the wreck. I hitchhike to a cornfield in Ohio, then to a state fair, toss chicken rings onto a corn dog stuck in a fried cheesecake, smush whole sticks of butter into cannoli shells, Alaskan landscapes of pure sugar, drink beer after beer after beer as I continuously gnaw and mold a ball of gyro meat, pour melted caramel and other sugar syrups onto my tongue right from the squeeze bottle, and I’m still there when the whole thing is supposed to be over and the livestock are led into trucks and the grass is splattered with powdered sugar, and I’m just in this place that I thought was a field but is actually a parking lot, and I flag down another car, and I say take me to the airport. Please. The guy drives and we listen to Prince Royce, and I say please keep driving and now I’m in Maine, and I get out of the car and climb the espaliered fence, encrusted with botanicals, and board the misty mail boat, and I’m ready to get going, but I’m reading a bestselling novel about tomorrow.




Luke Degnan

levelheaded: The car right through the wall

 

The repetition of the word “right” in the first line of this week’s poem gives it added weight. While the primary read is to assume the car has gone directly “through the wall,” directly “into the room illuminated by the light from a gnarled lamppost outside,” the word “right” also suggests that these actions taking place was somehow correct–whether that be morally correct or simply correct in occurring in this place and in this time within this cosmos.

 

As we read on, place and time seem especially relevant. The words “Ohio,” “Alaskan,” and “Maine” help situate us in the United States. The present tense verbs situate us in the present. Also contributing to the poem’s sense of immediacy and inviting us into the work is the colloquial language found in phrases like “I totally just run away from the wreck.”

 

So our speaker is in the U.S. right now. What does he do? He wrecks a car, flees the scene, stuffs his face with fatty foods, witnesses livestock being loaded onto trucks, mistakes a parking lot for a field. Beyond serving as plot points in the speaker’s story, the above actions also serve as indictments of American culture, suggesting we are careless harbingers of violence, gluttons, animal killers out of touch with nature.

 

This last idea, that Americans are at odds with their own nature and the natural world, is echoed in the poem’s final sentence. When the speaker arrives in Maine–perhaps a symbol of nature with its “espaliered fence, encrusted with botanicals”–he is ready to enter that world. And yet, it remains out of reach, on the horizon potentially but not here, not now, like the setting of “a bestselling novel about tomorrow.”

 

 

– The Editors