Someone crashed slowly

into the side of my car. “He
waved me on,” the driver said
as the man she pointed to

gunned through the changing
light. The car she hit was
my boyfriend’s convertible.

I don’t remember what he said
or when we knew we shouldn’t
have married. He spackled

and painted till the car was
green as undergrowth, green as
the sweater and skirt my sister

and I traded back and forth.
I drove the smashed car to class
and trembled in darkness

as the professor showed slides
of dodecahedrons, garden
apartments, brutalist concrete.

I heard a crash like a tray of mugs
dropped in a restaurant kitchen,
like wind taking a shed apart

plank by plank, like coat racks
skating giddily into each other
and bringing each other down.

Barbara Daniels’ Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press in 2020. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. Barbara received a 2020 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.