The Maynard
Fall 2018

Road Trip, 1985

Mom, of course I’m not popular
in my homemade jeans—appliques
on ass pockets are always going to land
me in the outfield. So, please, let’s pack
ourselves into the wood-panelled wagon
and tour the western quarter, drive
to your brother’s wedding and enjoy
the last moments of his faking straight,
anything to disrupt the summer. The jeans
don’t even have rivets.

Dad, it’s hot in these boxy states,
days filled with desiccated felt-tip
pens and dead pronghorns out a window
that only rolls down halfway. I long
to be a sandal lost in a manmade
duckpond in Boise, a bison comatose
on the cusp of Yellowstone’s
sulphurous caldron, a tread fragment
supine on the median, anything
but a doughy kid in glasses.

God, you should’ve locked the car,
should have known that the pristine
long-sleevery of Salt Lake City
is a front, that lunching in the park
of a Latter-Day church is not protection
enough to keep our suitcases out
of someone else’s hand, that re-winding
the cassette of J. Geils Band’s “Freeze Frame”
will not stem the flow of time or bring
my retainer back to bridge the gap.