the femmes are getting violent (or maybe they always have been) when you realize that you’ve fallen asleep at the wheel and awoken in a warzone flanked by three Silverados and a beige-gray, post-monsoon, steel-blue bumper, which reminds you of the blue of a police car’s strobe or the eyes of a model on the cover of Vogue, which then becomes a metaphor for the modern world and all the seemingly useless things that have resonance in it, which is why the sight of a royal blue dumpster is a way of the universe reminding you that this excursion is nothing but a form of ache, and it’s when you realize this that you begin to feel it in your nasal passages and your vocal cords, which is also when someone begins sharing a smoke with their passenger to pass the miserable time, reminding you of those years that you were immune to mortality rates and would stand outside in July and ash your Parliaments on the heads of cockroaches as someone muttered something about Descartes then shifted their weight before begrudgingly returning to the classroom instead of the bar. But someone always hurts or gets hurt by the debris of the city or the droppings of birds as they look up to witness the flocks of thousands scattering from one electrical wire into the shadows of the nameless mountain range whose peaks must’ve been hand-colored with burnt sienna, which is the moment you realize that nothing beautiful seems as real as the Silverado to your left, or the video feed from the traffic camera above your head, or the sad people walking their dogs along the greenbelt.

Rosemarie Dombrowski is the founder of rinky dink press, the co-founder/host of the Phoenix Poetry Series, and an editor at Four Chambers. Her collections include The Book of Emergencies, which was the 2016 Human Relations Indie Book Award recipient (Personal Challenge category) and The Philosophy of Unclean Things. She teaches courses on radical poetics and creative ethnography at Arizona State’s Downtown campus. Additionally, she is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix, AZ.