(I sent the wrong version. Growl.)
Wide Highways, Thin Roads
She drove her eighteen-wheeler
across the Great Basin,
"Earl" and "Bertha" so loud jackalopes
frightened for miles around.
The load - straight-to-breakage toys,
pirated music and videos
destined for the discount bin,
paperbacks due to be remanded
before she returned to Frisco's docks.
coast to coast
she pushed more than most
sometimes lost
A wrong turn on KC's beltway,
past oak-lined streets,
manicured lawns,
and three story antebellum columns.
A green rubber ball bounces into the avenue.
Night fog so thick on the Bay bridge,
stoplights morphed into bat's eyes,
a twenty-three car pile-up left behind.
An April white-out south of Clarkesburg,
ice and wind from Stonecoal Lake
rising to grab the wheels and turn the windshield
into a polar ice cap without bears.
Gully washer on the Platte,
drive-by in Susanville,
speed trap where brothers once died,
each for their own vision of freedom.
harbor bound
she sped the ground
sometimes found
Carols on the radio as she ran top speed
to drop her load before first light on Christmas day,
a cup of coffee from a stranger
when she staggered into the truck stop
with a two tire blow-out,
the smile of a family of migrants
when she let them hitch in a record Kansas sun,
the desert after a late spring rain.
A clapboard bar outside Fort Collins -
greasy fries and congealed omelet,
age and too many wide highways
left their tracks across her face
until he smiled from his scruffy boots
to sweat-stained Stetson,
the trail of too many hard rodeo landings
and sleepless nights in pickup beds across his.
running East or West
she was among the best
until she found rest
along side a cabin near Homer.
Her last trip up the thin road to Alaska
before her old bones betrayed her,
Hank loud enough to scare
the grizzlies for miles around,
a feather bed and scruffy boots to assure
it didn't get too fluffy,
paperbacks with their front cover gone.
a gear shift her headstone
Dec Byron Sacre at: http://gardawg.homestead.com/gardawg.html... Writer's
Hood at http://www.writershood.com/... Poets for Peace.... ˇPoemas sí, balas
no!
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