~
To the Limit
What of skin traveling? What of lovedrunk & midnight curves? Dear god, I think I am willing not to play it safe. To even be a license plate on a car you once owned, the tracks left in the snow, the axle grinding. I want to drive with you to visit New York in the still-grey mouth of spring, open the Big Apple in between our teeth like a blossom exploding when we kiss. Let me be the address set to home in your phone. Every wheel on the road turning like you were rolling over in our bed, gripping to touch the next wide open thing. I feel guilty admitting it but I want your tongue to be the route I take back to myself. Some taste of bare metal between freedom and safety. Give me the wild, automatic transmission of heat. Fly past the days we spent, parked nowhere magnificent. I don’t want stop signs or speed bumps, though I don’t know how far we’ll go without them, but I want to push this throttled body to its limit, all the cop car lights chasing after us like a thousand tiny flares, crashing into stars—
~
Kara Knickerbocker
Kara Knickerbocker is a writer from Pennsylvania and the author of the chapbooks The Shedding Before the Swell (dancing girl press, 2018) and Next to Everything that is Breakable (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poetry and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from: Poet Lore, HOBART, Levee Magazine, Portland Review, and the anthologies Pennsylvania’s Best Emerging Poets, Crack the Spine, and more. She writes with the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University, and co-curated the MadFridays Reading Series. Find her online at www.karaknickerbocker.com and Twitter @karaknick.