Montage with Honda and Squall

Abstract

Montage with Honda and Squall Andrew Collard (bio) The spare tire caked in Coke spilled back in summer is too flat to take the full weightof your minivan, your work jeans soaked through at the knees, and knuckles scraped. You think I can make the BP, and turn the engine over because, after all, it's just a mile off along the roadside reefs of snow, each layer topped the shade of soot, then flurried over clean. Is it the blood lab, this time, or the late shift at the warehousegesturing you out into the wound of evening, is it a child, impatiently awaiting for hours your arrival in the principal's office, convinced by now one night you won't return? The van's rattle is so severe no steering can correct it, and after thirty seconds of convulsing over slush and concrete, the hands you can no longer feelfail to answer the SUV blasting toward you across your memory of the median— you are suspended, then, in the tangle of all that bewilders you, where there is no world to be recognized beyond the dark coast of the dash, the rubber soles through which you've come to know the cold. From glass to broken glass, from shudderingto silence, you can't recall the point of impact. Every impulse that has led you here, to wreck beneath an unlit streetlight on the fourth coldest day in a year composed of coldest days, has been a single, fluid motion. No one is coming to ease you from the cloth-covered seat, unless you call them, no promised Samaritanor intervening tow's bright signal will divide [End Page 39] the snow squall curtaining the block unless you reach your hand toward your phone to raise it from a bed of broken glass as though it were the world's last piece of bread, put your mouth to the receiver, and speak— [End Page 40] Andrew Collard Andrew Collard is the author of Sprawl (Ohio University Press, 2023), winner of the Hollis Summers Prize. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, AGNI, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. He lives in Grand Rapids, MI, with his son, where he teaches at Grand Valley State University. Copyright © 2023 University of Wisconsin Board of Regents