BROOKE SHERIDAN

Tomorrow Afternoon

A Greyhound travels south
out of Ohio, passengers trying
hard not to touch.
Casey finds and angle
so her knees don’t drive
into the greasy seat back,
finds a relative comfort,
makes another attempt to bend
time and space.
She closes her eyes on the zoetrope cornfields,
she is a point in the eleven dimensions
of the Great Fabric, always moving,
like a marble on a half-blown balloon.
If she tries she can see Neptune,
galaxies, her mom’s house, next year.

We were all once stars.

She shuts her eyes and breathes slower
makes herself faster
molecules accelerate
and her body grows dense.
She is skin and bones and blood
hummingbird wings only faster,
back and forth, this universe,
to the next.

Do the others see her blinking
in and out? The crows know,
they fountain away.

The bus falls into her,
duffels shifting, bolts undoing
though others may feel
only a shiver, slight, wheels
on a bump -
she is a universe
magnet. The passengers lean
like a circle of dominoes, pushed
as if to hear her whisper. No one knows
Kentucky’s the event horizon
and they’re about to take a trip.