Spring, 2003
Riding the margin
the guardrail sings its sad,
sad song.
The windshield will not punch back,
hair stuck to the wheel while the blood
swells in your wrist.
Bald stare in the closing heat,
the blue unmerciful around lines of glass
that shatter spectacularly,
but stay intact.
Another odd fate,
tracing the cut glass that cannot cut you,
nothing can keep the beauty from
finding your fist—
but what light spills from such things?
There is nothing now save the sweat
in your throat;
you blink your eyes,
the hazard lights, your heart.
Adam Grabowski holds an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and is the recipient of a 2020 Parent-Writer Fellowship from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. His poems have been featured or are forthcoming in such journals as Hobart, jubilat, and Sixth Finch, as well as the anthologies What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Rage in the Age of Trump and Alongside We Travel: Contemporary Poets on Autism. Adam currently lives a life of stern comfort, alongside his wife and two daughters, in Holyoke, Massachusetts.
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