Exocarps

Exocarps

You stare at your face
on the green card, more wrinkled
than your veins, name shedded
into frames. Speckled with stars &
picket fences. The window blurs
your eyes as you sit on the plastic
seat, more warmth outside than
in your hands, as you fumble over
a coin, unaccepted currency.
The map on the wall of the bus
is turned horizontal, the city
squashed into a line where each
destination lights up as the wheels
screech. Except the light
is broken, constantly flashing
at an avenue you
long left. The man sitting across
from you devours a beer bottle
with his eyes and the woman beside
you eyes a poster plastering
the ceiling, the color of immigration
eroded on your face. Your hands
become a stranger, a preservation
of your memories. The first time
you sat on your own seat in transportation
you had only a clothbound bag
of illiterate lifelines, surrounding
this silhouetted world, shadows
like boundary lines
drawn with a wall, colored
in shapes. A crumpled flyer
under your feet as you pick up
the wet poster and see
your reflection in the mud.