I don’t know why some poems have to be prose poems. I’m sure there’s an M.F.A. reason. For me, they blast out of me like a wind I can’t stop and slam onto the page. I could have written it with line breaks and made you dance down the page. Could have. But then you wouldn’t have felt the blast.

LOST

They were in the car. The keys were. They are always somewhere but sometimes I have to retrace my steps five times before I look in the exact place I believe they are not. No, I’d never leave them there. I must have set them in the kitchen, on the table, the chair. They must have slid behind the cushion, the bedspread, the bookcase. They can’t be where they are, which is in the car. I would never do that, leave them where the car could be stolen. But I did. And it wasn’t. I was distracted, you see. She was with me. We were dashing in and dashing out. It was all supposed to be so breezy. In and out. But it isn’t breezy with her. It’s new. And tremulous. And crazy making. Which is why I left the keys in the car, a place I’d never leave them and then drive myself into another kind of crazy looking for them.

©Lindsey Lane