Highways I pace like veins

but don’t know the names of.

I forget that I drive myself home from places now.

No– I don’t need a taxi driver

or a chauffeur.

I will never be too old to admit I sometimes

pick up my phone to pretend that I could

just call my mom to come get me.

I want the seamless travel, sleepy weaving of locations,

thumb print of static sifting on the radio

in my temples.

Rest my head against the door– breath only through a trickle

of wind.

I want a conversation that meanders back into

the hum of slave-hymns in the rubber wheels and

wincing of seat belts at stoplights.

I want to steer like my mother does.

like a tired swaying crucifix on a rosary.

I wait at the street corner of a strip mall for a blue station wagon

that’s not coming.

The car still has sharpie doodles of ghosts scribble on the

ceiling from when my brother and I were young

enough that if we called it art it could be framed.

I once tore plastic hunks out of the door frame

on one trip to Chingoteague Island

and the wholes are still there.

Car trip boredom makes anarchists of eight-year-olds.

The car that was frequently late to guitar lessons on Wednesdays

that cradles stray french fries from Wendies in its throat

and stroked my hair from the passenger seat

on the way home from orthodontists and therapists

both trying to piece together the remnants of

a fourteen-year-old girl

who rode in the passenger seat.