Red Car in the Future

Now nothing happens anymore and she means
To walk out into the night and smell clamshells
Adulthood propped up with fossilized withered flowers
Caryatids at the base of the skull
Her senses once flashed there like fingers dancing in flags
Nothing has left her only daylight breaks
Less gently her bones and muscles shift
Toward a bewildered body out-aging a fleshier mind
The organic factory in which her friend shared
With her a sort of sex in obliterating light

Matthew Henriksen is the author of Ordinary Sun (Black Ocean, 2011). He co-edits the online poetry magazine Typo and lives and teaches in the Ozark Mountains.