Poetry |

“Driving Directions”

Driving Directions

 

On the phone, my father speaks near raptures of being

in parts of Virginia he’s known seventy years.

Some places it’s impossible to mark a change. Others

are gone completely, now, but seen painted thickly

under what’s there. Directions to the old farm:

take 221 west through Goode till you hit

where the mechanic used to be, and go right; pass

Screechum Hollow, Heirloom Road, the junkyard

and trailer park before turning right where the drive-in

was, a hole still in the shed where they projected sound

and cast the grainy picture like a cloud of lightning bugs

out against the screen; finally, pass the old red mill,

homes, trees, creeks, and our fields — empty,

green or gold, given the season—hang right again

at the abandoned county dump.

Just past our land, a ravine was strewn

with larger garbage: a washing machine more rust

than white, a wheelchair folded like a dead spider

in on itself. Every fall my mother misses the morning

as it fell then into that green gully to the east. And I see

just what I want to see, careless in my want

to be back there again and open

a vein of water to wet the dry stacks shuffled here,

though what I make is as different from true

as seeds burst from the sepals of bull thistles

along the north fence — fawn at summer’s end with light

and drought, soft as hair, golden as hay — are

from the broad purple matter that used to bloom there.

Contributor
Emma Aylor

Emma Aylor’s poems appear or are forthcoming in PleiadesNew Ohio Review, the Cincinnati ReviewSixth Finch, and Salt Hill. The recipient of Shenandoah’s 2020 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets, she holds an MFA from the University of Washington. Originally from Bedford County, Virginia, she lives in Lubbock, Texas, and is a PhD candidate at Texas Tech University.

Posted in Poetry

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