Poem with a Car Wreck

Me and my beloved at a Kieslowski
retrospective he hopes I’ll find
my passion for cinema    me too
the way I find my soup ladle rocking
behind the stove I will dip my heart
into this French-speaking blue film
and come out ready to eat
but of course I’m ashamed   what I
really hope for is the brisk and the blunt
like Nosferatu     my favorite part
being the opening    standing corpses
their mouths hanging
with a dire chorus    I like film openings
Saving Private Ryan’s
splash splash agony title
but tonight I get something else
flashing yellow lights a tunnel
we are riding in a Mercedes
with a bored little girl    not for very long  
fog and daylight a tree and a crash  
the husband little girl don’t make it
the lady tries to kill herself
then she writes music
in between she swims sees her mother
who can’t quite remember her
I ought to like it
no intrigue no plot nothing to not get
I don’t know ponderous    metonymy
come out and say it man
the baby mice she’s scared of
signal her little girl    the whore downstairs
mirrors the mistress she didn’t know about  
her asking the whore to kill the mice    well
I get it I’m not madame subtle but I get it
no I’d really rather this movie talk about
our new low-sodium diet Jesus
we’re going to die the deaths of our parents  
my parents! The first generation of Lins
to kick it in hospitals instead of home
to say I love you before wheeling into O.R.    I mean
who is more honest than a woman
on an operating table    the breeze twirling
through her ribs and knocking heart
her flesh already stinking    that sweet-vomit
anesthesia    the rest of us not knowing
squat    if I were in that movie
I’d be the boy who sees the car first
who snatches the gold cross off the lady
while her husband and child die next to her
that was the smartest thing
you’ll ever do kiddo trust me

 
Esther Lin

Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is the author of The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2017 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Drunken Boat, the Missouri Review, Triquarterly, Vinyl, and elsewhere. She was awarded the Crab Orchard Review’s 2018 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize, and was a recipient of the inaugural Undocupoets fellowship. Currently she is a 2017–19 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Please visit estherlinpoems.wordpress.com for more information.

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