Eating The Thing Like Joy

we watched the truck’s head flip
on the scree and then ford the daytime
highway, one of those loose trailer cabs,
you’ve seen them, they whiz shimmering
down the turnpike like steel-scaled lizards
free of their tails, legs that keep going
when the head’s crushed off, body and head
the same thing in that case, this one too,
I wasn’t driving, there was another wrapped
chocolate leaking in the pocket of my
jeans, you didn’t brake, on the right—
flash-corner of one long corrugated shack
bleached, hunkered up to the road, then
impact, then the shack crumpling in
like foil, blue-painted foil, orange first
and then blue, over it, maybe it is
joy, we have no idea what it means, that
word, to want it, want it with a rapt glaze
to our faces, come on and rapture us,
come shove our sun-peeled heads
in the quarry, tell us drink. We want
what’s brief. And fear-ridden. Fear
that what we saw is what we loved.

Emma De Lisle studies religion at Harvard and serves as Associate Editor of Peripheries. She has been a finalist for YesYes Books’ Pamet River Prize, Frontier Poetry’s Open Prize, and the Los Angeles Review Poetry Award. Her recent poems are out or forthcoming in, among others, Image, West Branch, The Adroit Journal, and North American Review.