When we danced that night
in the pulsing blue smoke –
I dreamt of endless road trip summers
one dirty bar to the next –
a never-ending cruise on the knife edge
between child and adulthood –
of waking up dirty with grass in my hair
and smiling at you through the haze
of still-not-sober.
The singer’s Tom Waits rasp
smoothed like a cat’s tongue –
we moved like one soul tied together
you led and I followed –
I would have followed you anywhere.
I could see it clearly –
how it would be to run away –
the clarity of it left me gasping
with almost-was.
Miranda Peery is a senior English major at Mansfield University of Pennsylvania and plans to attend graduate school in the autumn. She lives and writes in the Endless Mountains with her husband and their three children.
