Spark Plug, 2025

I am changing the spark plugs in my car,

white horse of errands and radio static mixed with rough idle.

My pants ripped across the thigh,

a scrape with no bleed,

our semi-healed suburban myth -

wrists aching, grease staining nails.

Denso! The irony. Japan, the factory father!

I pull the plug, charred black like his letters never sent,

engine misfiring like the Sunday calls that never came.

He made these - thirty years, molten metal, the math of disappearance.

He gave me socket wrenches, oil changes,

but not the language of keeping, only of leaving -

so I write new vowels in the air: stay, witness, soften.

My hands know bolts, but not how to say “you’re right.”

Fixing less than problems made.

Isn’t it damn poetic?

That the part that ignites combustion

the tiny prophet of power

burnt out, old, useless -

comes from the man who couldn’t hold flame

and now I remove it gently like an apology

and thread in a new one, bright, unlit.

I strike a match in the engine,

not to burn it down

but to go

further.