Alison Hicks
HOW IT IS
The white car that lives in the white of the eye
comes out of the sun
behind the line of parked cars,
the potted plant on the corner.
Always there, travels submarine.
Hides in white blood cells,
cruises arteries and veins,
slides through the body politic.
All the times it hasn’t shown
you’ve sensed its filmy existence,
so never completely a surprise
when it surfaces in peripheral vision.
The white car could be an actual car.
It could be an election,
getting lost in the woods for five days and nights,
a birth or death.
Too late to hit the gas, to swerve,
always your fault.
Tuck your head as it pulls you down,
slide through until it stops.
Alison Hicks is the author of poetry collections You Who Took the Boat Out and Kiss, a chapbook, Falling Dreams, a novella Love: A Story of Images, and co-editor of an anthology, Prompted. Her work has appeared in Eclipse, Gargoyle, Permafrost, and Poet Lore, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Green Hills Literary Lantern. Her awards include the Philadelphia City Paper Poetry Prize and two PA Council of the Arts Fellowships. She is the founder of Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which offers community-based writing workshops.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #27.
