Here they are again, sitting perfectly still on the wide gray river the humans poured for going, going nowhere, engines breathing that hot sweet gasoline breath up at me while I try to lift it away, and I do, I take it, I always take everything. I slide between the stopped metal shells and I find them: a hand drumming a wheel, a mouth open mid-shout at glass that does not answer, a paper cup of coffee gone cold on a little shelf.
I lift one man's newspaper right off the seat beside him through the cracked window and he swats at it like I meant something by it. I never mean anything.
They will not move but they will not leave either. That is the part I cannot hold in me. A creature that wants so badly to go somewhere it built this whole hard plain to do it, then sits and stays, drumming, cold coffee, red light spilling off a hundred hoods. Stay is a word with no shape to me. I have never been in the same place twice.
I carried off the smell of someone's rain-wet dog three streets back and I set it down in this jam, over a woman with her window cracked an inch, and I saw her lift her nose and not know why she suddenly missed something. That was mine. That was me. She will never know I passed.
I took a little of the heat, a little of the shouting, one loose receipt, the particular sigh of a man who has decided he is late now no matter what, and I lifted the hair off the back of a girl's neck so she shivered in July.
And then the light went green, and I was already six miles gone.