Stacy Marie Miller

please refrain

It smelled like suffocation it smelled 
like keeping my mouth shut
keeping my mouth shut 
was the least I could do
the least I could do was ask
and ask again, I asked and your 
answer was Oh, honey, you don’t—
Oh, honey in the late eighties 
there was no way for drivers
to lock the passenger side window

the passenger side window was 
mine and I could roll it down all 
the way in winter I rolled my window
down all the way as if to say—

the cold highway air said nothing
but was loud my resentment was 
so loud it roared like keeping 
my mouth shut
you asked me to shut it
I said I couldn’t breathe
I couldn’t breathe, but I rolled it
to a crack the size of my power 
to save you I saved nothing of you
but this rotten frond unfurling
in your pinkest places

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Stacy Marie Miller (she/her) lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. She has a B.A in English and Environmental Studies from Saint Mary’s College of Maryland, where she was Editor in Chief of AVATAR Literary Magazine. Her work has been published in wildscape. literary journal. She can be periodically sighted on Instagram @sloppy.minutiae.