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Order this writing that appears in the one-of-a-kind anthology The Limits of Imagination the Down in the Dirt January - April 2024 issues collection book		get the 422 page January - April 2024 Down in the Dirt 6" x 9" ISBN# perfect-bound paperback book:

Sardines of Heaven (for the car’s backseat)

L. Quattrochi

Orphans, beyond the hills and tornados
and screeching cassettes, beyond the icy paranoia
of roads and our mother’s white-knuckled driving,

we tried to believe we were homeward bound
but there was something written in the sky.
It was a prescription bottle up there,
the elegant names of constellations sounding
like Daddy’s antidepressant pills.

For years I wondered in my tiny car seat,
a thin flower with apple-seed eyes,

Was it the Big Dipper, the Northern Star,
those small silver platitudes light years beyond us,
calling our names? From our Cutlass’s backseat I watched
nightfall speeding running flying—seeing the same patterns
and airplanes and nothing more

even as my teen years passed—
I was the perpetually stunned youth grouper
who still rode home with my mama,

doodling rain, doodling hours
behind the moon in sheets of summer twilight,
sitting in the narthex, the lobby, lost in testament tracts,
out of my mind more and more every week.
Standing below a lamp pole
in a flowered skirt, feeling only cold concrete
and kids screaming. Headlights at a distance,
and I was running to the only base
I’d ever make. Home.

For months, I took along a girl
who covered her crooked teeth with her hand
and giggled in our backseat of orphans

but now the inside the hollow backseat
are the star-prints of one
directionless
born to Sundays in vain
her head buried, lost from the furious star’s repeating.

A line becomes a shape, becomes a world.
A night becomes you when you close your eyes
and let it. If you don’t lose your fragile footing,
if you hold your seatbelt tight.

I apologize to the moon rains
for concealing my silent self
for letting orphans slip by

but the night was impenetrable
and we were all on earth, heading home
to heaven, or only the gutters of heaven
where we’d pick acrid flowers.

Is this all you can do?
Does your heart matter at all
under the dark weight of God
can the love of another pull you through?

But the night was impenetrable
and we were locked in a safe metal box,
heading home, cramped and exhausted,
the sardines of heaven
among aching millions
we were luckier than the stars,

and the close air was full of us, sour-sweet redemption
and the night was full of us.

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