She was big-boned. Her spirit
a fine-spun sprouting of prairie brome
threaded through moss and engine block.
Her home was a pine and beatboard camp
for wayward cats.
She would discourse from her tangled porch
where poems grew in small pots
muddled with Ramen noodle and Maui Wowie.
Her life often vacationed to a studio apartment
on the east bank of her right eye.
She wrote on the back of her mouth
with cigarette smoke.
Her poems were the rain-filled footprints,
of Jack Kerouac.
She had pronouns before and after her name.
She wore a local fame, made legendary
by the gaps in her thoughts,
thoughts she shrewdly refused to fill in.
I never even drove till I was maybe twenty-five,
but then I learned, and so we bought a car for me to drive.
For fifteen hundred dollars, I got a crap sports car
with color kind of pink. That Monza never got me far!
Its brand I think was obsolete; I can't recall its look.
All that I recall was all my money that it took.
About a month I had it till our whole small family
used that car to take a Christmas trip out of the city.
So headed for the south we left, and yet we had no clue. . . .
Not even halfway out of our own state, the engine blew.
We had to pay to tow it home, and I cannot recall
If we later took our truck to make that trip at all!
Fixing it was not worthwhile. The engine block was shot.
Thanks to that, I got a blue Camaro, used but HOT!
And so the life of my first car, once I got it home,
was just about as lengthy as the lines of this short poem.
For Paula Swanson's "Driving Me Crazy" Contest
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