Driving Back to the Apartment (passanger seat)

[Erthona]

Overall this has some cleverness to it, but I found the first stanza problematic which made it difficult to get into the rest of the poem. I do like the extended metaphor of conversation being like the environment.

I couldn't really make a lot of sense of:

"like children shattering
a frozen creek. "

I understand the image more or less, I'm just not sure what it is suppose to say about the conversation. I think it could use some more clarification. I don't know if this relates to just the breaking of the ice, or does it speak to the children's interaction to each other, are they having a battle? Trying to aim the ice at each other like guided missiles. My guess would be you meant this as being equal to clipped, short phrases that burst out erratically, but it s not my job to guess, and as this sets up the rest of the poem, I've already lost my starting place. Are we starting out in anger, or this just playful banter. This uncertainty leads to doubt as to what the next stanza means. "Warm" can mean "loving" or it can mean "anger", and so it goes throughout the entire poem. Since you do not make clear the emotional tone from your initial simile, Holding back love or anger can get you to the end result,

"black orifice, smoke drip.
You stare."

Even if I can infer from this that this interaction has been negative from the start (which is by no means certain), I still have to get to the end of the poem to get the information I need to read the poem.
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On another note,

Enjambment is tricky at best, and should be treated like a loaded gun. As that is clearer than most of your similes, I'll leave it to you to decide what it means.

Cheers,

dale