Monday Poems: "Emergency Brake" -- by Dawn Losinger

The car will roll down the hill
Everything you own is disentangling.
Everything falls to the floor around the corner
into the wall. Through the window, a distortion of plains.

The car will roll down the hill.
Everything you own will betray you, tend towrard victim.
It is best to unload yourself.
It is best to unload as much as possible.
The car is the first to go, a muffled negotiation.

Finally your skull, heavy thing.

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dawn lonsinger’s poems and lyric essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Guernica: A Magazine of Arts & Politics, New Orleans Review, Subtropics, Best New Poets 2010, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, Smartish Pace’s Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, and four Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes, and holds an MFA from Cornell University and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah. "Emergency Brake" was published in her 2013 collection, Whelm.