Every Sunday, we think about driving to church,
but instead end up fucking
execution style: gruesomely, and against a wall.
I get caught in the headlights
of our love, and moon about intersections
like a lost traffic cone, orange and useless.
It’s always the same ending: our streets
slick and blurry in the spectacular
light of accidents, like artic borealis.
I ask far too much of us, to be a destination where
I meant to leave a lamentation,
I meant to shake a psalm from your skin, but no—
In reality, we are earnest in our erasure, truthful
as a salt-eaten screen door, and as loud.
July Westhale is the author of Trailer Trash(winner of the 2016 Kore Press Book Award), The Cavalcade, and Occasionally Accurate Science. Her most recent poetry can be found in The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, Rappahannock Review, Tupelo Quarterly, RHINO, Lunch Ticket, and Quarterly West. Her essays have been nominated for Best American Essays, as well as the Pushcart prize. She moonlights as a journalist at The Establishment, and has appeared in The Huffington Post.www.julywesthale.com