I Eat Poetry

Taxi Music
--Naya Valdellon


It’s become a habit, this backseat
sinking, a refrain on cue like swiping out
late. Outside, the highway plays
its nightly chords, other ways to wheel

you home. Taxi rides are grace notes
on clocked weekdays, luxuries you pocket
at overtime’s end. Save that sometimes,
your ears pay an unexpected price:

Mellow Touch past midnight, its jingle
older than these streets. You are the minstrel
all over again, plucking at memory’s
strings. A dashboard tiger, hardly sinister,

bobs its head to some alto’s crooning.
No hi-hos from the windshield’s dwarvish
seven, audience to the driver’s off-key
mumbling. On-air strumming turns

streetlights, shanties—even the whole city
and moon notated on a sheet of sky—
into instruments, percussive to your
melodious pain. How suburban, the way

sadness is rerouted, recycled like sighs
from chests to airwaves, pitched
as lullabyes for wakeful clichés tuned in
to this station tonight. Too taxing,

to remember who it is you’re missing.
A woman belts out someone else’s ache
and somewhere, a girl in a house
you just passed, cries herself to sleep

to this same song. No one is beyond
sappiness. Tomorrow, you will work
despite your bass heart’s drumming.
Upholstery muffles your solo humming.