Ode to a Class B Driver’s License with Tanker, Air Brakes, and Hazmat Endorsements

by Jill Bergantz Carley

Artem Maltsev

In the winter, when you tie off to the back bumper and make your way through snowdrifts taller than yourself outside the cabins, up the pass eastbound on CA-108

you Saint of Heat soaping up the connections by the light of your phone.

My love makes a living from brimstone & the raised letters across the face of his ID.

My love can swing a 500-gallon tank by crane, make you a warm miracle on your hillside. My love can tell when the heat will give out. My love dabbles in blue collar palmistry.

During the workday he depresses the pedal, at every railroad crossing compression adding friction he pushes the brake as far down as the pad can take it, a safe word in action that the State of California branded onto his brain.

His hands leave a trail of the FastScrub™ with which he cleans them at the completion of each surgery, arms deep in pressurized gas jugulars & it rubs off on me.

It’s your blue-flamed torch I light the wood with nights I wait for your return bare-shouldered and skin pinking up ready to strip you, of your steel-toed boots when I ache for your citrus scent to draw me close, wish it onto every part of me you wish to take.

I can hear your engine, idling at the door.

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Jill Bergantz Carley is a multiple Pushcart-nominated poet living in Northern California. Her first collection, ANIMAL VEGETABLE MINERAL, is forthcoming from UnCollected Press in 2020. She tweets @jbergantzcarley.