Half a Tank
Late in the kitchen, the keys
hang from a nail, a question.
“Are you still secretly riding your father’s motorcycle?”
No, Mom.
Then why is half the gas gone?
Evaporation, I say, a slow leak.
She rinses a glass. The room ticks.
As I square my notes at the lectern,
throttle the right syllables, mic idling low.
Auditorium buzz, a woman caps her pen; it taps the rail.
The AV cart hums in the aisle.
On the console the needle
shivers above E.
After the talk the glass doors
push me to the ring road.
“Are you still secretly riding your father’s motorcycle?”
Yes, Mom. Yes.
I go at night, no plates, easy on the clutch,
headlamp boring a clean white cone.
The talk’s tank of nouns runs to fumes.
I learn his lean through corners;
at a red light the engine settles,
my knee finds the tank, the bars fit right,
his sound under me, low, steady,
half a tank and moving.
I cut the engine outside. In the kitchen
the keys answer with one click.
Sean Wang is a PhD student. His poems appear or are forthcoming in West Trade Review, wildscape literary journal, Wild Roof Journal, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Pictura Journal, ONE ART, and Open: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L), where his work was selected for the Broadside Series, among others. He can be found on Instagram at @sean_wang1997.