It’s a Sunday
the windows are rolled down
it’s sunny but it isn’t hot
we don’t catch any red lights
there’s a good song on the radio
which is spotty and keeps cutting out
but we don’t mind, we just carry
on through it and keep singing
I pick up my air guitar and she plays
her steering wheel like she’s Dave Grohl.
She tells me this is one of her songs,
one of her songs the old sea witch, Tobacco
didn’t steal. She used to be able to sing.
Like, really sing. Like the kind of singing
that makes you feel better than a good kiss
or eating ripe fruit. Stress dressed her in
tar black lung and she lost it, she sits
now and chain smokes on my back porch
and curses her boss and sings Janis
but she can’t hit those notes anymore.
Heartbreak damned her to mourn in Marlboro
and now she croons from a back pew and idolizes
the way the choir girls hit those notes like gold bells.
Loneliness found refuge in her lullabies and she
doesn’t sing us to sleep anymore because it
tires her out, she is too tired. 
But sometimes I’ll catch her with her headphones
in, mopping or dusting or filing papers, and one
of those songs will come on, Patsy or Aretha,
and her tone will slip out the open windows,
and turn the streets to honey.