float

Float

There’s an angry man pounding his fists
on the roof of a car. A woman,
with two young children,
has locked
the car doors from the inside.
The children are crying,
howling with fear,
terrified
of a man
who is their father.

It’s the 1950s…
on the side of a gravel road,
with beer bottles on the floorboards
and the hangover smell
of drunken violence.

I knew it then—
what death could be.

I am outside
my body, floating. On a dark night
at the end of the world,
it begins to rain.