EMILY BANKS
Your Saturday Evening Trip with Uber
When the GPS pronounces "Ponce De Leon" wrong,
the Uber driver makes a joke to my boyfriend
about how he "tried to slap her around, but it didn’t work."
Offense, that fast familiar feeling, spreads
with hot pricks through my face
and down my back. In a second I’m sure my expression
has revealed itself, and he’s thinking
I’m one of those women, can’t take a joke
about another woman being hurt. I think she’s lucky
to be just a disembodied voice.
How many times have I, too, set myself
to autopilot, memorized phrases?
For the next twelve minutes, she and I
outdo ourselves, our voices flat and pleasant
as she says "Turn Left" and I say "Yes, that’s true,"
and finish with "You have arrived," "Thank you."
the Uber driver makes a joke to my boyfriend
about how he "tried to slap her around, but it didn’t work."
Offense, that fast familiar feeling, spreads
with hot pricks through my face
and down my back. In a second I’m sure my expression
has revealed itself, and he’s thinking
I’m one of those women, can’t take a joke
about another woman being hurt. I think she’s lucky
to be just a disembodied voice.
How many times have I, too, set myself
to autopilot, memorized phrases?
For the next twelve minutes, she and I
outdo ourselves, our voices flat and pleasant
as she says "Turn Left" and I say "Yes, that’s true,"
and finish with "You have arrived," "Thank you."
How I Learned to Stop Worrying
My Twitter feed is full of predictions
about the bomb. I’m guessing it’ll come
like everything, in time. Sometimes
on idyllic summer days, lake water
clinging to my eyelashes, I try
to remember that the world
is hanging in a delicate balance
above a vat of death, but it just seems
so far away right now.
Lately, I’ve been practicing
saying "I don’t care" more often,
like about how many bananas
we should buy, or where to hang
a photograph or if nuclear fallout
will ruin our plans tonight,
if it could reach inside
my favorite dive—no windows
and the steady smell of beer
drying on wood, it always feels
like time can’t catch us there.
Driving home
from New York, we decide
to take the scenic route—it’s only half an hour
longer, and what’s half an hour
to a fourteen hour drive
(especially if the world is ending soon)?
If there’s a line
where devastation stops,
it must be possible that of two people
sitting next to each other, only one
would be taken.
You’re on your phone
texting your mother
about her court date, and
I’m singing along
to Dixie Chicks songs I don’t really know
as we drive through a mountain range.
In Virginia, mountains peak sharper
than the maternal ones I grew up with.
They glisten with the bait
of adventure. I’ve always loved leaving.
I want to tell you I’m going to be free,
and you can come or not.
I hate the building you grew up in,
sad-eyed women folding their laundry
in yellowed rubber carts,
men who smell like aftershave and soup,
concrete walls and kids you went
to high school with and your mother
on the thirtieth floor like a dragon
locked in a tower, practicing
making her voice sound like a damsel
in distress.
I think New York
will never stop
feeling like a boulder on a string
that I’ve learned how to break
by driving fast enough.
If you keep falling asleep
while reading, you might never finish
1984, and what a funny thing
for them to find after.
I went online to read about the bomb,
instead I bought a bra.
about the bomb. I’m guessing it’ll come
like everything, in time. Sometimes
on idyllic summer days, lake water
clinging to my eyelashes, I try
to remember that the world
is hanging in a delicate balance
above a vat of death, but it just seems
so far away right now.
Lately, I’ve been practicing
saying "I don’t care" more often,
like about how many bananas
we should buy, or where to hang
a photograph or if nuclear fallout
will ruin our plans tonight,
if it could reach inside
my favorite dive—no windows
and the steady smell of beer
drying on wood, it always feels
like time can’t catch us there.
Driving home
from New York, we decide
to take the scenic route—it’s only half an hour
longer, and what’s half an hour
to a fourteen hour drive
(especially if the world is ending soon)?
If there’s a line
where devastation stops,
it must be possible that of two people
sitting next to each other, only one
would be taken.
You’re on your phone
texting your mother
about her court date, and
I’m singing along
to Dixie Chicks songs I don’t really know
as we drive through a mountain range.
In Virginia, mountains peak sharper
than the maternal ones I grew up with.
They glisten with the bait
of adventure. I’ve always loved leaving.
I want to tell you I’m going to be free,
and you can come or not.
I hate the building you grew up in,
sad-eyed women folding their laundry
in yellowed rubber carts,
men who smell like aftershave and soup,
concrete walls and kids you went
to high school with and your mother
on the thirtieth floor like a dragon
locked in a tower, practicing
making her voice sound like a damsel
in distress.
I think New York
will never stop
feeling like a boulder on a string
that I’ve learned how to break
by driving fast enough.
If you keep falling asleep
while reading, you might never finish
1984, and what a funny thing
for them to find after.
I went online to read about the bomb,
instead I bought a bra.
EMILY BANKS lives in Atlanta, where she is a doctoral candidate and poetry lecturer at Emory University. She received her MFA from the University of Maryland and her BA from UNC-Chapel Hill. Her poems have appeared in Superstition Review, Blood Orange Review, Cimarron Review, storySouth, Free State Review, Pembroke Magazine, Yemassee, and other journals. Her first collection, Mother Water, is forthcoming from Lynx House Press.