Your love is a wet risk

highway. Across the Midwest, you’re unfolding
your body: a road hungry
under a frontier-ish horizon. You still
prefer the sober lovers
with their foreign motors, but hate
the smell of oil.You know
how I’d let you
dance beneath my metal—
I’d drive all over you,

but this hurts me too

much: the swell and curl of your
nostrils and hate—you hate
the smell of oil. Well, any love is a wet risk,
a gamble ending in the spin out.
Or slip. The heart I hide behind the hood:
always speeding hot, too
easily interstated.
Lying down in front of me, you say,
Use my miles of hard concrete to
run away—I’m bigger than

your Middle East,
than your deeper South—well,
I know when
I hear an engine idling.You say,Now,

won’t you ride my good thousand
country miles—for you—exploding so
orange bright with interstate lights—me under
your moving body: I could make you
a vehicle so full of light—oh, beneath,
feel this longing—exploding so—
Oh,

no, I prefer the pavement rising under me
unlit, so lonely—
as if a province explored first—by my own dark
hands and the milky way—baby, I will always wear

your hate: the smell of oil.