BY JOANNA LEE
Outskirts, rain, deer
red barriers flash, falling. the rain
in sheets. csx, coal. movement behind,
a deer, startled by the clangs, leaping.
i put the jeep in park, its two new
used tires squelching to the valley
gravel, the deer long gone, already the train
slowing. heavy engine lights in dusted gray,
lowing like some wounded thing.
car after car sidles past &
i could open this door right now,
leave her left in park there by the tracks, cut
the ignition and step right in to the movement,
into the steady clack and huff, into the who-
knows-where, let the scratch of rails carry
me away from the worry, the bills, the nagging
fact that i am nearly home late after
too much tequila, that tomorrow
is more of the same, more bad news, more disappointment,
another war, another wildfire, another heartbreak, children
in cages, children shot in schools, all the children
i can never have swept
away in a small step up to the quiet joint
between cars, into the downpour, into
the darkness, blurred, gone.
the more things change
they’ve cut the fenceboards so the roots grow through, spilling onto the sidewalk. after the poetry reading, we stand and talk broken histories behind the bookstore, the rain pooling pollen like oilslicks, acid green. someone’s car won’t start but we gotcha—y’all just pile on in the back. see it: four women stalling out, checking each other’s eyes like rearviews for answers, hope. heels mudded, stamping, bareheaded. all damp not-aloneness, not this time, not now. we know: not worth it. on every streetcorner & in every parking lot there’s a man asking for something we can’t give.
Joanna Lee, M.D., has had her work published in numerous journals and has been nominated for both Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes. She is the author of Dissections (2017), a co-editor of the anthology Lingering in the Margins (2019), and founder of the Richmond, Virginia community River City Poets.
Process Note: I try to stay mindful as I go about the day, tucking seeds of poems away in a notebook or my phone for later. They may be the crux of a piece or a tangential detail when I finally start weaving the poem together later, usually in the quiet of night. Often, the “weaving” is of concrete images that lend themselves to a story through the language.