Long Distance
Jamie decides today will be the day
we take off to Kansas.
We've both dreamt of it,
driving off to flat lands
where we would be swept off,
cackling,
on our brooms to Oz.
I laugh,
an unfunny laugh.
Chipped and cracked,
it tumbles
across the phone line.
She laughs too,
an unfunny laugh,
and I stare at the phone
my eyes shaking,
clutching my life force
of Camel Jade cigarettes.
Dreaming suddenly of the Petroleum bridge
because it is so black today
and how I want to walk across
in my addled bare feet
like I did when we were seventeen
and find her
at end,
long hair sardonically twirled around her
pinky finger
in the tattered red
sun stained flannel,
and her purple converse
tennis shoes.
She remarks
that we wouldn't be able to reach off the
ground anyway,
as old and wide as we have gotten
and that
menthol cigarettes wouldn't
probably be popular with
midgets.
And I agree with her,
and laugh,
and cry,
and wonder
what silver cylindrical dreams use
when they move away
a slow sail down the Allegheny
a broken down old U-haul
or perhaps,
.........brooms and twisters
farther than Kansas, farther than Oz.
Copyright © Jennifer Brooks | Year Posted 2005
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