Parking Lot

by Laila Freeman

The bronze mini-van halts,
Hurling the driver and passenger
Forward in their suede seats.
Nora’s first time driving
And her mom says to ease
Her foot onto the brake
Instead of almost giving
Them whiplash. Now to try parking
in between any of the fifty, empty
White lines on the asphalt, unforgiving.

Newly licensed and curious
For youthful distractions, so naive.
Nora lugs her friends
Around the bleak town,
Sweating with lust for adventure.
Night guides them to the dim
Sea of hard, dark ground
And they share their thoughts
Together in the lone vessel.
​
Nora soon shuns the world,
Yet she still tells me “My A’s
Have become C’s, I’m barely passing.”
Her eyes are always glazed, but she composes
Herself enough to park crooked
Meeting a crook selling her pink
Champagne. The grotesque wheels suffocating
The pure paint of the lake’s abyss.

Wrong folks, developed into coke
Addiction with her fingertips sprawled
Out to the clouds forming in the van
When hotboxing didn’t suffice
And the forbidden flesh overtook
Nora as the crook became her vice.

Her sensual sins injected
New life--a July birth,
And she had to hammer
Her habits, no longer strung
Out. She resisted him, yet she clung
To his feeble finances,
Like the child clung to her

And some years later the squandered
Psyche grasped the neurons
Together, a miracle and electric
Ecstasy surged through spinal
Fluid when Nora’s daughter entered
The familiar, frantic ocean
And she didn’t brake with ease
Parking within the deserted lines, empty.

Laila Freeman has grown up in Orange County, California, and is currently pursuing her Journalism degree at Long Beach State University along with her creative writing endeavors. She is part workhorse and part bookworm. Freeman is and will always be diligent to inspire and inform others with her writing.