Does the Road Run East or West by Karen Craigo


 

You thought you knew everything
about the road. You drove down
every one of them, past playgrounds
where one kid weighted down
a seesaw, past convivial stockyards,
past lakes where tiny fishes dart
into and out of a skeleton’s eye.
So much to see in this world, and you
seem to miss everything. These days
what you know is a corner of your couch,
and how in lamplight the tip of your pen
touches its shadow twin, as if someone
on the other side is writing your poem
in reverse, or unwriting it. You suspect
the highway still lies—it didn’t roll up
like a tape measure behind you, but there
is someone you can’t find again, someone
on the far edge of everything, and it rains
over both of you and you put your hand
up to the window at night, recoil
from the cold one that almost gets you.

 

 

Karen Craigo teaches English to international students at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri. A chapbook, Someone Could Build Something Here, was just published by Winged City Chapbook Press, and her previous chapbook, Stone for an Eye, is part of the Wick Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in the journals Atticus Review, Poetry, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, Puerto del Sol, The MacGuffin, and others.