Meeting Miss America
Cumulonimbus is always some other state's rain.
A wrong turn off the 202, near the airport's
turgid mess. I move on down to double back,
tunnel through another dry brush landscape.
Just one off-ramp stoplight and her grocery cart's
ten feet from my car door, blocked from drifting
by a broken brick. Her rolled-up carpet pad
of blue-chip polyfoam and a tweed coat stick through
its chrome. A second pair of shoes.
Coming up on 45, she's at a rigid crossroads
in tennies and thin socks. It's 110 with all the signs
of dew points rising on her freckles.
My window's up, rolled tight: no handouts
from my purse for booze and Twinkies. She waves.
My window's gone and softened on me, oozes right
on down. "Any food with you?" That's real, I think,
and lean to find the one banana that I know
is there. "The best there is!" I say - and pitch it up
the incline through hot air, and grin for our
shared prize. "Potassium!" she yells
across the constant highway hum, she holds it
like a torch and grins right back.
Her hair's rubbed down to nubby, near-
transparent clumps. Brown eyes connect
from somewhere held inside her night. "You
ministered to me!" she croons, the light turns
green. Fingers to her lips, she palms me thanks.
The lane beside me pulses, and my lips
mumble as I go, "—And you to me,"
with no one listening, but I say it,
having listened anyway, and wish there were.
Page(s) 13
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The