Just Married by Sean Goggin

You haven’t spoken since Botetourt, but your face says it all---

Skull ripped open by a madman’s smile,

Hair yanked back in the wind like a comet’s tail

As we burn up these gunpowder highways,

Fuse set a-scrambling by an ‘I DO’ torch

Eons ago in Montgomery, & baby,

Not even the smothering blue seepage from those Culpeper clouds

Could dampen the fever of our top-down tornado, cause like

I told you: the sun don’t rise that we don’t see it

From the happy honeymoon sanctum of John Brown’s hopeful

Harper’s Ferry home---we’re taking this fire to the firehouse, baby!---

The countryside speeds by like nonsense as

We shoot through the Blue Ridge’s perforated veins,

Stoning the purple mountains completely majesty

With whatever it is we’ve got that’s morphing

This tree-brimmed highway into a spectral green cunt,

Six stories huge, struggling to swallow in one great, reaming gulp

The electro-chrome horsepill dancing on its dark interstate tongue, &

Suddenly the radio’s singing, “The sun’s not yellow...it’s chicken!” &

You laugh a total carnival like we have only this night left on Earth,

& hell, maybe we do, so I laugh too,

Checking out my runny eyes & bloodshot nose

In the rearview, the scorched road behind us dying

To keep pace, its linear perspective gone to ashes &

Its blackness spirited away by the hot gray smoke of our exploding tires

Crackling on at fastasshe’llgo,

Igniting the dry leaves piled along the arid streets of Purcellville---

“Didjoo know this is where the modern skateboard wheel was invented?”

I try to yell, but we’ve bitten off too many Dopplers & my words,

Before they can reach you, crumple back into our blurred asphalt past

Like so many passed highway towns screwed to the Earth

By glowing logos eighty feet in the air,

A thousand incandescent suns flashing by swifter than a memory,

Borne back, back, back by the windy, raging roar of the night’s ogre,

Who we’ve blasted awake with our four-wheel firestorm & the bright yellow laughter

We spill out into our exhaustive wake motoring on towards utter combustion,

Slavering to outrun the solar sonicboom nipping at our heels---

I hold my hand in the blonde fire whipping off your bones, crying

“Keep grinning, my little maniac! cause

It’s two hours till sunrise & home’s just on the other side of that horizon!”

Author bio: 

Sean Goggin is a recent graduate of the University of Virginia whose work was recently published in harlequin creature magazine. Fond of a prestissimo literary tempo, compound words, and neologisms, he splits his time between driving around the lovely state of Virginia and playing music professionally.