There’s something delicious
in riding the airport shuttle
without one’s affairs in order.
Such a relief to motor away from chaos.
All those passwords commemorated
on long-gone slips of paper,
dental records at a new office
the name of which I’ve repeated to no one,
tax returns that could be anywhere,
I slip out of town like a successful bandit.
A storage unit in another state,
my search history, uncleared.
Youthful jilts, catalogued.
Comeuppances, unclaimed.
Months of black holes left
unpuzzled. Volumes of scribblings:
a man, a cratered wall,
my skull, a sweaty silence.
What a mess, one could say.
All this evidence.
Passing over the Golden Gate Bridge
in the pre-morning fog,
I think, this is how weightless
a life can be.
Linda Michel-Cassidy is an installation artist. Her writing can be found in No Tokens, Catapult, Jabberwock, Harper Palate, and others. She is a contributing editor at Entropy Magazine. She works for the literary series and press, Why There Are Words, and the Mill Valley, CA Library.