Jon Lavieri
Traffic
Three girls in the car behind me are singing
and dancing inside their seatbelts
rocking the car and clapping their hands
to the same tempo of a different song
that was already playing in my head
It’s the very brink of summer
and my heart is dancing under a seatbelt
of its own. I’m trying to believe
this sudden permission
to feel someone else’s joy
will be enough to make me forget
where I’m going and fall in love
with this car crash of being alive
I cannot hear the singing girls
or the song that lifts them off the page
of a day so average it could be yesterday
even the stoplight is dancing and turning
green against an endless cobalt sky
as we drive away and listen
to the smoldering voices inside us
singing arias to the dark world
and dancing inside their seatbelts
rocking the car and clapping their hands
to the same tempo of a different song
that was already playing in my head
It’s the very brink of summer
and my heart is dancing under a seatbelt
of its own. I’m trying to believe
this sudden permission
to feel someone else’s joy
will be enough to make me forget
where I’m going and fall in love
with this car crash of being alive
I cannot hear the singing girls
or the song that lifts them off the page
of a day so average it could be yesterday
even the stoplight is dancing and turning
green against an endless cobalt sky
as we drive away and listen
to the smoldering voices inside us
singing arias to the dark world
Jon Lavieri‘s poems have appeared in New York Quarterly, the new renaissance (UK) and Ambit (UK), among other magazines as well as the anthology, Night Out: Poems About Hotels, Motels, Restaurants and Bars. His new poems come following a twenty year hiatus and several years living overseas.
