Tar Ad Oil Ipsum – Lily Bix Daw
July 23, 2025
He scrapes tar oil off the ground at the chicken spot on Sherman and East 12th street, while the sky sits heavy and the space around objects colored yellow and darkened roughens my hair. I don’t mind. We said goodbye but not forever. I’m passing a sign that says redemption. It fills the bowl and the air. I buy 50 cents worth of plastic from a meat factory that’s been running below the hill with the cheap gas. We miss the cheap gas. I pass a sign that says redemption. I squint at the confluence. My left eye sees the swallows while in my right eye they disappear into the empty sky. They dip and soar like things on a string, a ring being tossed and caught over and over again. In my right eye they are non things and I control them with my squint. The man in the big black car says this will be a safe and gentle ride and confides, smiling, not including the 11th hour. I accept this.
We’re avoiding tolls. You don’t need mine? I miss the fragrant yellow boxes scattered around my mother’s room. I have excuses for why I haven’t called but I refuse to explore them. Rolling across the land. Following arrows and lines, we find ourselves to be a dot- best believe that he loves your point. Miles from home there’s always talk of crossroads, but less so river confluences. In the middle I notice how much I have changed from the last time I forded the slick. The oil is devoid of arch. Progressing through it is like being an anatomically correct gondola. Railroad men are always polite. They inspect their hands before offering me the cleaner one to hold onto.
Whose smell is that. That’s burning tires, that’s breaks. Those objects which remain when a body is gone. I feel pressure in my head and I allow it to exist in a hotdog that resembles a dog’s penis.
Another highway means another plastic man. He asks me what I’m doing and I tell him I am moving into the crawlspace that houses my animatronic mammal. It sits inside a piece of machinery drinking caffeine to stay awake for hours on end and is tasked with the logistical processes of millions of freight trains. Totally unable to access anything not rooted in cybernetic relationships. I tell him on the curb that if I am aware of this perhaps I can bridge the gap with this animal and we can relieve each other of the two very different but equally heavy jobs of loving and organizing America. The small animal takes a smoke break and cries for me, great heaven sobs. We sit at the rest stop and wait for our turn at the pump. Walking the sidewalk the microscope bears down and heats me with the energy of my own skin and nails. I am chewing myself up like dip. When we’re approaching the divinity of Law Point I will feel a pit inside widen, the car reverse and shore itself up at the brink. The driver on his best behavior, suffocated and bound, my desire to move wherever the line takes me but I refuse this with regularity. The referential driver tells the story of Adam and Eve through the lens of an employee. He asks my name and I feel stillness inside me that will guide me through the rest of my life.
I am sure of this. I will not let myself forget, although the road ahead will be full of pain and loss.
The sky is the color of a stone when at last we reach that same stretch of road with the battered trees that my mother drove us down for one last final time. This time we are leaving the city and in stop and go traffic facing a wall of rain. There are no raptor sentinels this time, but I’m safe nonetheless. If it collides with my future or rides alongside it of its own accord, that would be different. That could be a good, and I take full responsibility, and I know it.
The top of my head itches in a new way and I wonder if it is because of the lightning arcing down on the flats all around us. Still on this, but this time I can see.
I’m darkening it bit by bit. I put my hat on for that glimmer.
I’m darkening it too long. I’ve been in this room piece by piece. I try to appreciate what they give me, as it is love in all the forms it takes. I will go fry my head in a rock bed, to try to be the stillness and meet it where it is.
Now it’s back in the game, looking at the body like it’s back in the room. Show me what it looks like in a circular mirror.
It is hard to know and to remember here in this stale of a place. It is much easier to remember when I am in the confluence, but I try to remember the feeling of house and cold hearth and breathe that into my life here.
The way the sun filters into her living room and the dust in the air and the little room with the animal.. I miss the feeling of floating in a womb that wasn’t ever anybody’s..
It was unsatisfactory in the way I knew it would be.
My left cheek by my coronoid process hurts and feels swollen and tight, a bag of bones and metal and tissue falling apart and bumping up against itself in a vacuum.
Is the one eroding me? The shower is too abrupt and the mascara is pooling beneath my eyes.
I am like hi there.
Hey how are you- how’s your night. It going good? I’m good. A little slow maybe. You could turn that around. Do you want a drink? Sure. I’ll have tequila soda. My nails are too long. I need a secretary. The secretary is a woman in her thirties with long blonde hair and a chin that has been professionally shaved down by a certified professional in Connecticut and it’s still healing and she looks beautiful.
I get a lot of things secretly. I get botox secretly. I open boxes secretly.
I do not do this for myself.
Some days every thing looks like a dead dog lying in the leaves along the side of the road.
And I know why you made that sound. I want to go up and down in a pseudo dimensional California. And all around. I want to be the bouncer of Candy’s bad check. I want to relieve Candice of her debt.
The gas station still, the driver gone. I am discovered coincidentally by a man in his late 50s who looks at me as though I am a truck.
We begin some quiet mashing, which begins at the top of our heads and ends where our vestigial tails would’ve been, near the sacrum.
He says he’s a family roller.
I’m starting to understand what my high school English teacher with white person dreads told us almost a decade ago in the last rising weeks of spring.
I step out onto a grate so complete it seems to rise through me. Do you think madness is just an evasive act. Evasion of prophecy is an invasion of privacy is contempt for individuality. I’m a wrapper of candy.
He knows no different than a perfect life.
Mine’s not either.
I’m in my truck bro I have a big red R. My red, ours. You too? Been on there for going on almost 2 years now and they just don’t talk about it. My R is 22. There’s 24 in a day.
Bucket of blood.
Wait, no you’re not. No you’re not. I’ll be like a bloody bucket. Couple brawls in the basement.
Everybody’s trying to get by. When you’re done, you don’t go home, but where you end up, you go there, and you’re not alone. Everyone is trying to get by. I repeat,
What’s that to a flower that never stops blooming, a small life with how many hours on its face?
I’m too outside to enjoy the weather. I’m too outside to feel the relief. I’m inside now. Let me inside, I feel a little better, I feel safe inside that booth with the view of the Hasidic child’s shoe in the new pavement.
The Spirit of the Valley never dies, it only changes. I don’t think I’m worthy of it- I don’t steal and I live inside of a box. I’m out there somewhere, inside a wet field, doing some things you like. Seeing a band. Do you like it? I don’t care. Is the sun upon your face? What’s your age? How are you today?
Every time I see a Chevy I’m mistaken. I think it’s fancy and I feel so heavy.
I got the spirit on my mind. Some people say the truth isn’t a little thing. Maybe big things happen to winners, why we buy these little papers every time we stop at Cumbies. Microconfluences vomit when a microinfluencer enters them, it’s biological. It runs its hand along your thigh.
If you try to do math in romantic dealings you’re more than the sum, it makes you crazy. I can see you’re trying to make the women understand what you’re feeling. Whip them into a frenzy, make them feel a lot, make them get down on their knees, make them believe in God. The Spirit of the Valley inverts the world, makes it a dish not a dome. These aren’t sentences. You’re more than all the things you try to avoid.