You will take a strange journey.
In the night you will mistake crumpled Pepsi cans
for the eyes of deer. You will
apply the brakes. Around this sharp curve
a blinding truck with a plow, a sudden shock
of fog, and then the sweet black certainty
that nobody is looking for you.
You will size up each ditch in passing,
too much mud in this one,
that one too shallow. Your car will creak
and chuff against the dull grade
of the hill.
One wet mailbox
will become another, until like thawing fingers
you will rejoin the living, pull up
to the house. "He's here," you'll hear
your youngest sister say. "We thought
that you were lost."
photograh by Connor Tomas O'Brien
