Requiem for a Body Warm

Ventura Highway is a song written about a road in America by a band called America, I always knew it but got to know it better a few years ago because you really loved that song because your dad really loved that song, so you’d play it in the car so loud my head would ache, I’d say, My head aches, you’d say, Maybe it’s a brain tumor, it could be a tumor, take that cigarette out of your mouth, you’ll get tumors like Dad, just listen to this song, so we’d listen to the song as the freeway bent around the land like my mind around your fingers, you’d press them in, massage it, bruise it, bruised brains don’t think well, The estate is beautiful, I thought when you pulled in, it was my first thought because you had only said, My godmother has a humble estate in Orange, which was ironic because if you have an estate in Orange it is not likely to be humble and it wasn’t humble, so it wasn’t ironic, it was a lie, the kitchen was five times the height of you, the light fixtures cost more than my car, your godmother drank wine until her head fell off, she offered me some because it was okay because even though I was seventeen I was in college, so okay, I drank the wine and didn’t like it, she told me to move into her guesthouse, Will you sing that song for us, she asked, Will you sing it please, so you sat on the piano and I sat pressed against you and I sang, she cried, she said, Oh my god it is like he is here, she grabbed my face, You have his light, I never met your dad but still felt like she meant it, we drove our Ventura Highway home, Pacific Coast Highway, Freeway, I said, Call it the freeway, this is California dammit, we rode as you bleated the days are longer, I know long days, that one time you beat the steering wheel and threw your rage at my head, you shattered but I didn’t, you always did tell me I was strong, you always said you loved my voice, you always said you loved it most when it was singing the words of Dewey Bunnell, so no, I didn’t shatter, I shrunk into a creature of the desert, crawled through the cacti, through the meat and bones and diamond rings, through the sand like ash, his ashes you threw into the Pacific, a man made Earth, a girl without a name, would you pick that sand out from under my nails, please, pick it out with your teeth and don’t bite don’t bite don’t bite. 

Natalie Gates is a writer based in Springfield, MO. She received her BS in Creative Writing from Missouri State University, and her work has appeared in Frontier Poetry. 

A Song for Natalie