my bike was stolen last summer and i’ve been angry ever since

By Nadia Mota

it was some eighties relic, with its lavender brake wires and teal candy coating chipped over the rust-filled insides. but it was mine, pulled from junkyard wreckage: scrap metal melted down to silver overwrought river banks, a chained dog’s strained bark in the distance, cars twisted into the bodies of my best friend’s dead friends, so alive and thriving just two years ago. my friend talks about them in the present tense; the way she tells it, they always make it to see Sunday morning. my father told me the other day, this shit makes a man wanna go back to selling drugs. it’s hard out here, he said, all empty pockets and open palms. the bike’s tires used to buzz and whir beneath me, hummingbird wings across cracked pavement, their sprouting weeds growing fertile like my baby cousin’s baby girl, born not long after her fourteenth birthday. she spent all day in a hospital room with pink balloons and somber celebration. i stowed the bike away behind the old YMCA with all my overconfidence, so inconspicuous with its busted frame and slashed seat. 3am and a missing shadow under orange street lamp glow. i took the long walk home, my knuckles white against my keys.

Nadia Mota is a Chicana writer from southeast Michigan. She is an MFA candidate at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. Nadia is an editor at Viscerama, a digital zine devoted to publishing and supporting Lenawee County youth.