A Drive Home Across the Embers of the Chesapeake Bay

A Drive Home Across the Embers of the Chesapeake Bay

The city is gray, as always. 

Ahead a sea of potholes,  

infrastructural craters like the 

surface of the moon, pooling up the 

silvery late-winter light, rainwater. 

Sunday, eleven in the morning. Early, impatient. 

Some alt-rock track beats melodramatically 

against the plastic car radio, 

against the dirty windows, rolled up 

against the revolting scent of the bay. 

Prosthetic oaks stretch thick branches towards the 

blank slate sky, powerful, precisely 

decapitated to make room for powerlines. 

There are business signs here, missing letters 

and unenthused. Thai Restaurant, one announces 

in a monotone. Moma’s Grocery says another, one faded green 

M away from the comfort of motherhood. 

The car, only dented, bright red metal 

and a leaky tire, rattles past the grocery store 

where I bought birthday cakes and Valentine’s Day flowers, 

across from the roller-rink where my roommate got robbed 

for fifteen dollars. 

An old, brick high school flicks past the windshield, 

reminds me of my old life, old self,  

where the streets were pathed smooth and my 

hands didn’t shake quite so much against the steering wheel. 

Still, I hate that bygone building, the overchoked parking lot, 

the cruel shadows that I took for friends, the staff composed by a  

non-fractional percentage of sex criminals, the time passing 

so slowly that I could feel it slip through my hair like lake water. 

The specter shrinks to nothing in the rearview. 

A terrace of dead grass ebbs and flows at forty miles an hour, 

the federal hill for which this bleak stretch of shuttered bars 

and vomit-filled sewers is named. There’s an ancient memory of my 

father, watching as my brother and I rolled down this hill on our 

stomachs, bodies turned to grass stains with each revolution. 

Headlights refract from the walls of 

the Visionary Arts Museum, slathered in glass panels, 

an amalgam, part building, part disco ball. 

My grandfather is in there somewhere, still alive, 

still staring at the absurdist displays with his jaw 

slack, hands clasped behind him. 

I don’t stop to say hello, just keep trundling on 

past the street where a stranger set fire to  

a girl’s face with pepper spray, painted bruises 

on the birchwood sticks of her arms, 

where she stuck the flaming skull against my collarbone and passed 

the flames onto me, as simple as 

lighting one birthday candle with another. 

In the distance sits the hospital where 

I sat with the girl on fire and  

we stared at linoleum tiles until our eyes were  

nothing but spindly little tendrils of bloodshot. 

And up there is the baseball stadium, the seats 

always empty so you can sit wherever you like. 

There’s the concert venue where I got 

kicked in the head during the encore and 

caught a guitar pick half-blind, 

there's the aquarium where I fell in love with a  

burning skeleton, there’s the old, out-of-business 

bookstore where my mom 

bought me a copy of a Ned Vizzini novel  

just before he jumped off a building in Brooklyn, 

there's the oil slick we call a water feature, 

there is the too-thin street tucked between 

a carless parking lot and a grime-soaked McDonalds, 

the street that leads back to home. 

I slam the car door shut with the ball of my foot, 

my life crammed in one cardboard box and balanced 

on my forearms. Home is brick, steel, wide windows that 

sit silent and full like aquarium glass. 

Home is still so far away. 

She is still burning, still catching the world around her 

alight, still bathing me in gold, orange, red, 

still standing all alone at the jellyfish exhibit 

watching sea-nettle float in primordial aimlessness, 

azure flames of their habitat tucked safely behind a  

windowpane, that blue water blazing the hottest. 

And on the way home she reaches down and brushes a fingertip  

across the sickly surface of the Chesapeake and watches the whole  

damn thing explode, we let the memories burn 

to make space for new ones, 

burn like my forearms as I lug this box full of relics 

up the awkwardly long steps to home, head empty, 

eyes hungry, dead-brown hair turned to 

broiling flames licking at the city gray with 

warm technicolor tongues. 

Honorary Mention Academy of American Poets College and University Prize - Loyola University Maryland

2023