Untraveled

Sometimes I miss your banjo strum. You didn’t know
I listened when I fussed and dipped chicken into egg,
coated the white meat of our dinner
with crushed cornflakes, heated our frozen
succotash and Poppin’ Fresh rolls.

I think about dinner and watching Cosmos:
“For small creatures such as us, the vastness
is only bearable with love,” Carl Sagan said. We
had hunger and questions, wanted answers
from gravity and unknown galaxies, and cheap

wine. We made love on the floor before
the show ended. I missed your call
the next day at my cubicle, where I was careful
that car ads didn’t run in the same two-minute break.
I replayed your voice-mail apologies.

And this many years past that meteor
of us, the crash, the burn, the cold rock and dust,
I wonder who our children would’ve been,
in what city our vacation home, what stories
you never got to tell me about lacerations you stitched,

or hearts you restarted, or babies you pulled
into this earth. I reimagine old places you took me
on the back of your Harley, without a helmet
just leaning with each bend, wind-tangled hair,
dust flew while we rumbled over back roads,
places no one knew.

Potomac Review (2015)

© Cathy Allman
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