Another sweat-filled summer in a midwest state that knows exactly how to break my heart and I find myself turning to Luiza Flynn-Goodlet’s Mud in Our Mouths. Not for comfort, necessarily, but yes–there is some comfort in experiencing queer love during what feels like the end of the world. The freedom that comes with this, that allows us to stretch our legs out, and talk to “For The Dying Chick Outside Whole Foods, Albuquerque, NM”. A eulogy as much as it is an address, this poem is oven-hot. Like, I can feel the heat radiating off the page and that’s not just because it’s mid-August

Then Flynn-Goodlet brings up my favorite flower, an ode titled “For Queen Anne’s Lace, Cairo, IL” and my hand goes to my chest. I can feel the cross-pollination of wild carrot spanning from my home to the speaker’s time on the road. “Wild carrot, we too are / thought poison–” is reminiscent of the fear we harbor and the guts it takes to even get out of the car and pump gas sometimes. Like in many of her poems, it has that bitter-sweet punch of an ending that reminds us “stay / sweet, a pinprick of red at our hearts.” I’ve pressed a small queen anne’s lace between this poem and “Object Permanence” and I look forward to finding it again in the near future. A gift to a future self who needs this reminder, too.

Mud in Our Mouths feels like going on a long nature walk, being hit by a highway, and hitchhiking your way home but the person who picks you up is an old and familiar lover. I’m spending my last few days teaching in Michigan before heading back to the East Coast and returning my grandmother’s car to her garage. It’s been collecting dust and since (like a true New Yorker) I’ve only had my license for a few months I’m just brave enough to drive on those two lane roads where people can pass me at their leisure even as I speed upwards of 70 mph.

Flynn-Goodlet has a way of driving us through the poem. We move from place poem to place poem, almost like taking us on a tour and introducing us to various landmarks. The landmarks in question? A thunderstorm and a Whole Foods in New Mexico, a gas station and some wildflowers in Illinois, a mastectomy and then off to a Super Walmart, a dildo in the grass in Union City… things I would gloss over if behind the wheel but Flynn-Goodlet makes us stop and look.

The landmarks get more abstract as the collection goes on. Suddenly, we’re not in a parking lot but considering “Aubade for Every Broken Thing, Union City, TN”. It’s a gentle poem, closer to home. “Don’t / wake yet–let me pull the twin sheet over your / curls, keep the world from its spin a moment as / your breath troubles this smallest thunderstorm.” There’s this feeling that Flynn-Goodlet is telling us we have arrived at our destination. It’s time to follow her into the forest, to take off our shoes and fill our pockets with berries, too.

She leaves us in Wyoming– and this feels like new and unfamiliar ground. It makes me want to stick up my thumb and ask for directions but only from the speaker of the poem. This person would get why I don’t drink water on long car rides. Why I’m not ready to get out of the car, why it took me twenty-four years to even get behind the wheel. They would show me their landmarks, they would ask me for my name and I’d tell them the real thing.