Tikva Hecht

Night Driving

The dark is skin with thin creases

where the light waits,

light stripped down to electricity,

symbolizing only what it illuminates: the road,

sections of a metal railing, tufts of overgrown

something. Inside the car the glass is cold, tells you again and again

it will protect you, reminds you to keep moving. I know the feeling.

The world laid out into just what is tangible and illuminable,

the dark tangible, breathable and stilted of breath,

gravel and metal railings marking the way,

isolation tangible as one glove stumbling on the wind across sleeper lines,

tangible as cold hands and strange hands, and your hand,

safe against the cold glass still against the cold world lying still,

moves to a warm spot on my neck

and there is warmth and there is

a pulse below the skin, and there is

the wind at the window coming from below

the dark, in through the opened window into our skin

bringing soon the light until it is almost expected.

Tikva Hecht holds an MA in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research and is an MFA poetry candidate at University of California, Riverside. Her work has appeared in CV2, The Broken Plate, JLJ, Jones Avenue, and Canadian Literature.