Curled into the bench seat like astronauts
they hurtled through the dark, stars hanging low
outside the dust-dimmed beam of her headlights, his eyes
twinned planets in her mirror.
This poem is published in Volume 23. Art by Rhiannon Williams
Rambling conversation, comfortable strangers,
that strange intimacy of predawn,
those trickling hours that bathe any awake in them
with a winedrunk kind of exhaustion and longing.
She didn’t tell him
how the slow drawl of his voice made her imagine
the leathered smell of pipe smoke,
the tight-coiled ropes of his thighs,
for just the length of a breath made her dream
a different version of this story.
One where that sudden ache of closeness
might be more than just the dazed inchoate glow
of 4am drives and shared belays and flashing eyes,
of newness,
of skin sparking like wires.
She didn’t speak the dream, just rolled its taste
round in her mouth
then breathed out, letting go,
exhaling dream-tellings of their story in a lazy ring into the desert air
as the stars faded and the ridgelined edges of the world reappeared.
It lingered in her hair, a trace
like sagefire smoke.
Long after they arrived at the tower’s base
and emerged in the morning light,
separate, blinking, retreating half-inward with the caution of anemones,
after they had stretched and swum
through the slowly swelling hours
upward through sunbaked stone
and calcite-slick chimneys,
tethered together, the tides
of each pitch drawing them in
and away
and in
electricity arcing from proximate skin—
after they had dropped from the summit, down
the shade-starved washes
and parted,
she would never tell him
how she caught once more that lingering dream-scent and smiled
windows down
driving westward with empty mirrors
alone and whole in the waning light.
Sarah Carr is a teacher and tinkerer who lives in Mancos, Colorado, with her dog, Modus. She teaches literature and writing and occasionally even writes things herself. She first fell hard for rock climbing by losing a lot of skin on North Carolina granite in the mid 2000s. After she landed in Colorado in 2010, it didn’t take too many trips to the desert and the alpine for her to realize that the most fun part of rocks is the cracks between ’em (and the views from the top!). She dreams of tight hand cracks, bumpy singletrack, and building a better world from the ashes of this one.
This poem is published in Volume 23 of The Climbing Zine, now available.
