Love-car
​Gloria Chen

“I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .”
— Robert Lowell, “Skunk Hour”

I parked the car near 
a construction site that was quietly inhaling
night air in late July
tasted like flare
You took up the passenger seat and
told me to keep the headlights on
I breathed out darkness, my seat
was a dock
You were the wave who got lost

White vapors hanging from my head
Did I turn the AC to the coldest a human
could bear
Now my car was a morgue
But you rose to my 
cheeks like a marvel.

My hands, gripping the wheel
When it painfully horned
You painted the window fogged
I could stay forever
when the radio moaned
You waited for two
red traffic lights
when they were wo-mansplaining Robert Lowell
Are we in love or a love-car?

You took a picture of me
leaning my head on the window as if
it was the last page of a medieval manuscript
My hair drew the dark inscription
which you were dying to
sign your name under.

Gloria (SC '27) is an English major who studies medieval old men but writes about cross-cultural womanhood.