The Letter X Drives from Tallahassee to Orlando

to Break Up With His Girlfriend Face to Face

Angle-less landscape and still
I can’t see what’s coming –

something about the curve
of the planet, emptiness of the air,

not the heat but the humiliation
ahead of me. Windows down,

almost nine p.m., feels like noon,
soup-warm, small breeze, I’m rehearsing

though I fear that it’s a bad idea,
that polished is a synonym for insincere,

so many other cars on this road,
I assume all of them aimless,

we are silhouettes in passing,
nothing more to each other,

avoiding eye contact, and I am tempted
to stop at Café Risque,

whose billboards promise hot coffee
and the stripping away

of the everyday obstacles that keep
one person from another,

as if flesh ever solved anything,
as if a bad pun will get me laid –

soon there’s a toll to be paid
and I’m listening to music

from high school: rhymes
without consequences, one guitar solo

after another, all crescendo and crash,
every line, why, almost believable.

Amorak Huey teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2012, Caketrain, RHINO, Rattle, Linebreak, and other journals. Follow him on Twitter: @amorak.