Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
The Fan Belt Snapped
As for your car, your Ford Estate,
one day when I’d dropped kids at school
and shopped, and for a moment thought,
the day’s okay, the fan belt snapped.
That was it. Beyond repair.
And then I stood outside in air
so light, I felt the earth was space
and where I paced—your resting place.
Joan Michelson, originally from Boston, lives in London. She has published a collection of poetry, Toward the Heliopause (Poetic Matrix Publishers, 2011), as well as prose and poems in the British Council’s annual anthologies of New Writing. She has received writing fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Djerassi Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has also won the 2011–2012 Year Members Prize from the Poetry Society of England and is currently the Poet Laureate of Thornton’s Budgens, London. Michelson was former Head of Creative Writing at University of Wolverhampton and is now lecturer in poetry at Birkbeck College, University of London. (updated 8/2012)