"Delivery" by Julia DaSilva

Delivery

You tell me this might be our last chance
for a road trip.
When I go to reverse
from the unholy ghost of this suburban
driveway it still takes me a minute
to calculate which way
to turn the wheel, but you say
no one’s checking licenses,
anymore. We agree
it’s your job
to bring a case of water bottles.
You bring two cases of orange juice
instead, in grade school boxes.
When you turn on the music
through your cracked
phone screen, I crack
the circle of aluminum with my straw and find
that until this second
I have been dying of dehydration.
Gold horizon floods my tongue.

The backseat is all medical supplies,
antibiotics and surgical
masks and insulin
for somewhere that fell off the grid just
as I was falling for the way
you said let’s make sure our love
leaves fumes at the side of the highway.
The world will be cleaner
from here on in but in these last gasps
of the diesel one we take
only country roads — I’m
still learning, after all.
We cross a steel bridge all adorned
with ribbons tied by lovers
and grayed by their exhaust.

I didn’t learn how to drive in time.
I guess I thought I’d fall
in love and it would be a portal,
to anywhere. Now
there is no gas for the trucks
that might have taken
what we are left to take. Or maybe
you were just the fastest to key
the ignition. Maybe
no one needs us.
I wasn’t ready for this long road magic.
I hit a curb and you smile
at the bump, remind me
we have time to practice slow.

After eight hours
of cycling through your boxed sugar
playlist spilling sweet orange notes
out the car windows, we stop
at a motel where all the locks
have been ripped off the doors.
We watch a goose
pause traversing the flat roof,
consider a jump.

We deliver the plastic-
wrapped boxes to a makeshift
field hospital and keep driving.
We finish the orange juice,
sing out of tune and cracked
like the screen of the phone you forget
in the truck-stop arcade where we free
the pinballs and roll
them across the food court,
laughing like six-year-olds.

Seven days in, I remember
this might be our last chance.
I think about how one time a print run
of the Bible replaced vineyard with vinegar
and the grapes still grew,
all summer.
I change the running title,
pull us into a small
abandoned church in a small
abandoned town.
I am a ripe orange.
Bathed in sunset-stained
glass, the curve of your shoulder
under your tank top tells me every word
is a misprint of the world.
I have never let myself
have a conversion scene.
You wait while I drop
from the last branch stiffening
me to grace.

We get back in the car.
You drive all night on instant coffee
and anarchy, and I sleep
with your sweater for a pillow.
The dawn is red ribbons
left by passersby.
The sky is strewn with steel.
I tell you, Joan,
I’m ready
to hear the angels.

Julia DaSilva

Julia DaSilva’s poetry has appeared in Eclectica, Lychee Rind Zine, Cathexis, Sapphic Writers Collective, Half A Grapefruit, High Shelf Press, and Reckoning. She writes fantasy as well as poetry, with a particular interest in the politics of magic systems. Her writing explores political responsibility, love, and embodiment in worlds coming apart and being rebuilt.

Headshot: Mary Alexis

Photo Credit: Staff