Saturday Night After Work

Well wait just a minute, you told me.
I didn’t come all this way for nothing, you know.
It was Saturday night after work.
You had crawled out from between the cushions
in the backseat of my car.

I know, I’m sorry for your trouble.
I have to get home.

My hand shook over the key.
Your head extended out from your neck,
the shaft of which wrapped around my headrest,
your face meeting my cheek on the window side,
to kiss the cold glass and transfer
the chill to my face,
worn rubber on the slab–like
every corpse ever under the knife.

Your tongue was a ticking I
could never take.
My friends were all liars,
terrible though you were.
They said I could handle myself,
but here you were.
Handle me.

I didn’t say anything out loud.
Just waited for you to recede,
to shrink back into the cushions
into the car frame
into the ground,
following every move
like a shadow
glued there.
Hello, guilty conscience,
your name is a song my throat
forever sings.

Megan Kellerman is a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson’s Creative Writing program. Her work has appeared in Catfish Creek, and is forthcoming in Emerge and Symmetry Pebbles. She received the Andonis Decavalles Poetry Scholarship twice, as well as an MFA Award for Excellence in her major at FDU.