My finger joints stretch while lifting a car battery.
I bend my knees, carrying the weight from the trunk
of mom's car, like a mover lifting TV sets, recliner chairs,
side tables, popping veins in thick forearms like a character
out of bad gay porn. Blood rushes to my head, morphing
nerve impulses into cyclones of "oh my God"
uprooting all other thoughts, like hundreds
of Midwestern girls named Dorothy
being transported to Oz, a hundred Totos
hiding in baskets inside flying farmer homes.
I consider dropping it, frightened of its heaviness,
of it hitting the ground, imagining its insides bursting out.
My dad is paying for a new battery in the Sears auto store.
The salesman requested that we retrieve the old one.
I questioned this trade-in while walking outside,
waving the car keys and the door locks remote,
recalling the facial features of a mechanic
who passed me on his way to the garage.
He walked like a hustler approaching a john.
His Latino thug expression, thick eyebrows, goatee,
and licked bottom lip signaled scenes of bathroom blowjobs,
glory holes, and slow-motion cum shots on blonde muscle boy
faces. Stall doors swung open in my head as I unlocked the trunk,
visualizing that blue collar Adonis stroking it off, saying "oh my God,"
in a trying-to-catch-his-breath voice, that pre-ejaculation and post-orgasm
shout, like a scream echoing through windswept bedrooms crashing
in unknown worlds, flattening wicked witches, spreading her
insides out. I'm shuffling stiff-legged toward the store,
barely holding on to a 50-pound car battery,
losing my grip with each step,
forgetting how my fingers work,
accepting the numbness of pain,
wishing I was in that garage instead,
paying for a white collar attitude, bent over,
chest on the engine under the propped up hood,
a hot Latino mechanic behind me, tearing off my clothes.