Last Air

Abstract

Jeffrey Gray | 65 The road to the past is dirt with a slant wood fence that winds beside it down the hill. Calcium pours out of your bones into your tissue, salt burns like rope through your hands. Why wait another five minutes? you thought. After that, it was one foot in front of the other. * She had to have shopped for the hose, measured it, fit it with duct tape to the pipe and run it through the back seat, had to have chosen the spot, driven there, looked east over the freeway, smoked. poetry Last Air Jeffrey Gray 66 | Jeffrey Gray Had to have said goodbye to her cat, still in the house when the examiner arrived, must have studied, learned how long till sleep came, whether there’d be pain. She would have thought of the choices. No blood, no shock. Two years later, on a highway in New Jersey, standing in the exhaust to tie down 2 x 4’s, I thought: this was the last air she breathed. * Summer returns like a sleeping boy, the sky in the city is full again of the last air. Over the canal, over the wooden stairway sagging back of the house, over the gurney at the funeral home in the Fremont district, just the other side of the bridge Jeffrey Gray | 67 where Fred’s gallery perched in the desert of Seattle. On the bed an old pink quilt, its childish planets spinning. ...