Polaroid

Andrew Elliott

I once got talking to a girl on a bus. 

 Her father had worked for the US Air Force. 

 She said it had been to do with black shit and stuff. 

 We had both of us boarded at Corpus Christi. 

 I had noticed her hair, it was like my own. 

 From a wide centre parting it fell to no purpose. 

She may never have washed it but combed it 

 till her scalp bled with the kind of comb 

 in which every other tooth has been broken but one 

 and which had once been the only thing of value found 

 on the body of a great-great-great-grandfather 

 killed fighting on the Yankee side at the battle of Gettysburg. 

We could've been twins, we were kind of androgynous（雌雄同体的）. 

 She talked about growing up, how she'd dropped out of college. 

 At Laredo two officers boarded the bus. 

 They checked everyone's papers, everyone but us. 

 I think I must have mouthed, We're invisible!

 because she turned away and stared at her reflection in the glass. 

We were falling asleep, that much was obvious 

 yet every now and then the conversation kind of twitched 

 and when she said she'd read a book about spontaneous combustion（自燃） 

 it was as if our souls were suddenly rubbing 

 like two still green sappy sticks together 

 in the hope that we might set ourselves blazing --

we were both of us certainly thin enough! --

 and so leave on our seats -- their vinyl backs a melted mess --

 the ash of our flesh, the little pile of mingled bones, 

 partly powder where they touch, our skulls 

 split open down the middle -- and become, as it were, 

 a crime scene, reported by the driver on arrival in Phoenix 

where the photograph taken by forensics 

 would have found its way somehow into the hands of the press --

 cold-eyed men who had seen a lot worse 

 and who would to be honest have all but ignored it 

 if it hadn't been for the National Enquirer 

 whose editor would have hollered, Hold the front page!

and shifted an account, complete with pictures, 

 of two unidentified elongated objects 

 travelling at a speed described by the guy 

 who'd just happened to be out there photographing cacti（仙人掌） 

 as hyperfreakin retinal dude, across each blown-up's 

 chromatic vibrations, to that week's centre spread.