This morning, after breakfast with my family, we'll head back to Maine with our young people. It's been a good holiday, cheerful and undemanding, and T and I have felt so lucky to have had this fat chunk of time with our sweet and funny kids. We'll have one more night with them at home, and then they'll be off to Chicago again, and we'll drop back into quiet.

But for the moment here I lie, in this comfortable bed in this old hotel, listening to the traffic swirl around the town center, listening to T sigh in his sleep beside me, listening to the hotel heat spit and creak. 

Night Driving on the New Jersey Turnpike

 

Dawn Potter

The exits flicker past like film stills frozen under a swan

of spotlight. Each green and white message is a lure

and a snare: follow this trail, eat these breadcrumbs,

and you, too, will stumble into the net.

The steering wheel is all that holds you from the edge,

You instruct your hands to cling to ten and two,

feel the tremor of chaos beneath the tires.

Palms sweat, vertigo flickers in knees. A body

understands all too well what it means to 

burst open, to barrel like a poisoned condor

through the jail bars of a guardrail. It expects

this result, it plans for terror, and meanwhile

exits dazzle and vanish, dazzle and vanish,

a spool of missed chances, instantly forgotten.

[from Calendar (Deerbrook Editions, 2024)]