Bryce Emley
Summer 2024 | Poetry
Future Elegy in a 2010 Toyota Prius
—McKinley County, NM, 2017
Already a little drunk and doing 60,
we were looking for the end
of the desert on unnamed roads
and every pothole felt like a coda.
Tyler lit a Marlboro and passed it into rotation
with a bottle of Manischewitz,
a can of something hoppy, a gallon jug of water.
BADBADNOTGOOD was playing on repeat,
and we’d all just lost someone.
We pulled off, pissed
under so many stars it felt intrusive.
I think now we must have looked
like children from across the dark,
gaping into the composure of night,
feeling in the stillness any beautiful thing
shouldn’t belong to us.
I didn’t know it yet, but I was tired
of being a man, of so many
little recklessnesses, of wanting.
When I woke in the bathroom
of a house I didn’t own, it seemed impossible
we could have made it so far,
like acting out a memory of stranger’s life
until you mistake it for your own.
Bryce Emley is the author of the chapbooks Calculating Physics [a reference guide] (Alternating Current, forthcoming), A Brief Family History of Drowning (winner of the 2018 Sonder Press Chapbook Prize), and Smoke and Glass (Folded Word, 2018). A recipient of awards from Aspen Autumn Words, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Glen Workshop, the Wesleyan Summer Writers Conference, Sixfold, and the Pablo Neruda Prize, Bryce works as a content writer in New Mexico.