Johnny Cash

You might test his leather arm for muscles
as resistance rattled like a tray on your lap,
your arms and valley below you dissolving
from the tight pinpoints of snout houses,
the slash of young freeways. Down below,
your parents’ clones sleep desperately,
fathers’ cigars drowned in glasses
and mothers waiting in gingham sheets, frigid,
fingering the longest novels.
But this night, you clip the suburban calm
with the sirens of insects, the giggling tilt
of the bottle’s shot of country in the city hills.
In countless frilly windows, heads snap awake and see you,
a bland daughter at the only time you ever
cast off my looming future, my mother,
kissing Johnny Cash at make-out point.