A journal of narrative writing.
God in a Squad Car or Rain in Indianoplace in the Summertime

Here, no one knows the difference
between watch and warning. But they say,
if you live in a trailer and see a funnel cloud
assume it's the moonshine, or take cover in a ditch.
Here, young women have been known to binge drink,
to photograph the Virgin Mary store,
the international symbol for no.

Inside the Chatterbox lounge with the metro boys and the blues,
I dry off next to the wind through bullet holes in the front glass.
I play the juke -- #135, #272. I'm wearing my heart
in my breast, not knowing how to blow my smoke,
not sure how to guess the difference between
the cabernet and the merlot/boyfriend John, boyfriend Paul.
Upon suggestion I envy Amy, the cigarette distributor
who ties pink kerchiefs around her neck
who turns all the art girls bisexual, bi-polar.

I'm binge drinking tonight and I excuse myself to puke
in the ladies’ room below the Ferlinghetti
writing on the wall. I come back to the booth
and Officer W., cop-poet, is all
like, "Let me give you a ride home."
He's gentlemanly with his evident wrinkles and nightstick,
the solitary tick-tack he offers me in the squad car, so I let him
take me home, kiss me. So I believe him when he touches me
with his scanner static, his quiet sirens. I believe the story
of his handless thresher accident, of his big ghetto bust
starring the chicken bones in the ashtray.

The national weather service has issued
a severe thunderstorm warning for central Indiana

and the cop-poet turns his radio down, looks at me
with those dog-sniff/licked eyes. He means it
when he paws at me with his rough skin of veins.
I count five seconds between the thunder
and the lightening that follows, trying to locate
the storm's center, the danger. As if the moon's sick yellow
and window's thick fog signify something more
than the puddles making mud outside,
something more than the twisted, turned-up worms.

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