the headlight is out again but you know the best thing is having nowhere to go other than fast. love, do you know how the world looks from the passenger side? from spaces between the spilled coffee stains and crushed receipts, the way the wind picks up as your singing voice gets lower. those vibrations that make you synch and sink into the lull of the highway. remember the diner that never closes? i ask because your eyes are starved and like every morning we wake together to find wind tore this land apart though we never hear it, too busy internally combusting into air or each other. we too are damaged when the sun hits the pavement. what is energy if not this and this morning, when it happens, always tastes like trapped electricity. there is nothing calm here. there never will be. you sputter, spat, spew. i’ve never wanted a morning if i knew it was coming so find me at the diner that is waiting for us still. in it we’ll find some old couple and we’ll look just like them, so i’ll say that metallic hello i’ll never stop saying. they’ll take my hands and tell me how to keep going or i’ll weave aged fingers into mine and dance all arms and lack of rhythm, the tiniest experience of togetherness. our bodies frantic despite being bodiesstill. our existences converging and diverging for a moment, this moment converging and diverging into our bodies. everything together, then everything apart, everything now, everything right now. love, i’ve never been so hungry as i am when we peel out of the lit-up parking lot one last time, covered in chrome and stomachs full. you catch your own neon gaze in the rearview mirror, the façade crumbles into the patchwork road, i hit the gas.
***
Madeline Augusta Turner lives in Northampton, Massachusetts and writes in search of home and fruit blossoms. A student of anthropology and soil at Smith College, her writing is shaped by her ever-growing community and her life on a farm at the intersection of industrial decay and endless cornfields. You can find her on Instagram @madelineaugusta or on Twitter @soilslut.
image: Lindsay Hargrave
Rejection Letters 