2009 -- 1.2 (Spring) Poetry

Red by T. Allen Culpepper ~ep

In it from overspending
for the most fabulous gift,
and seeing it after
a fight with his boyfriend–
on Valentine’s Day,
he takes off down the road
in the brand-new Mustang
gleaming with the flashiest
shade of it.
Revving the engine well past
its caution marks on the gauges,
and then missing the signals
flashing it in warning,
he plows into a wall of it,
painted like a barn with it,
but speeding down
parallel rails.
On force of impact,
it gushes like a geyser
from his punctured heart,
and the siren-lights
of the medics
swirl it too late.
After his family has chosen
a coffin silk-lined with it,
six men carry him down
a carpeted aisle of it.
At the wake, their eyes
streaked with it,
friends drink glass
after glass of it,
toasting the memory
of the flaming young radical
whose real name they had
replaced with it.