Demolition Derby
Sonya's so good that all the guys pick on her, so the evening's narrative goes. I've heard she wears yellow t-shirts each time to match her hair. Last time her tennis shoes got so dusty that she had to throw them out because there was no way on earth that they could be white again. Trunks shrink like deflated accor- dions, like melodramatic arguments after they've met face to face with someone's indifference. A baby cries and pouts while her mother is trying to scoop more Velveta on to her nacho. The father is strung out on something, someone in back of us says. A teenager with severe acne turns around and fires a dart full of cavities into my gaze. We give in to the pleasure of destruction for the sheer sake of waste. What inside, the collision, the jerk on the nape that makes the driver wonder whether this one's it. Swallow me dust while the crowd cheers and claps its French fries away into the space between a nearby neon and the floodlights gathering an army of many sized moths.
Reprinted from American Poet, Fall 2002. Copyright © 2002 by Mónica de la Torre. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.