Road Trip

Erik Moyer

I picked you up at Union Station.
You said more like Onion Station.
You walked with your feet forward
and your torso leant back,
like you were taking your feet for a walk.
We passed a billboard that read,
“Your wife’s hot. Get your AC fixed.”
and a business sign proclaiming,
“Sakura Paper: True Performance”
and I wondered what that meant,

for paper to perform. You were grumpy
company, so we stopped for brunch.
I held up a piece of toast and declared,
“A toast.” You broke like a pool rack,
divulging how you had just bought a lemon tree
and named it Leminem. I said it’s interesting
how some apartments manage to feel like a home
and some houses manage not to.
The tip jar read, “Afraid of change?
Leave it here.” So I did. We slipped

past a slick-faced teen on the way out
with a t-shirt that read, “Don’t fuck with me”
on the front and, “I WILL cry”
on the back. I grumbled about fuel efficiency
and all the penguin blood on my hands,
and you reassured me that 100 companies
are responsible for 70% of global emissions.
We reached our destination atop the canyon
just in time for the kind of cotton candy sunset
cinematographers miss their child’s birth for.

You told me you’ve been watching period dramas,
and I said gross. You cringed, but eventually conceded
there’s no such thing as problematic subject matter,
only problematic content. It started to rain,
so I set my umbrella on fire. Beneath the flit
of the flame, you pointed out that I had spilled
mustard on my shirt, and instinctively
I looked down. You scuffed the tip of my beak
like a door stopper, a boioioioioing
tintinnabulating my shame over dead desert air. 

Erik Moyer is a creative writing PhD student and teaching fellow at the University of North Texas. He holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine and a BS from the University of Virginia. His work has appeared in Cola Literary Review, Oxford Poetry, and Passages North, among others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Outside of school, he works as a data engineer. In his free time, he enjoys writing songs, playing chess, and convincing his cat Xena that shoelaces are, in fact, snakes.