There’s trouble. With an engine light blinking, we drive through the yellow state too fast to say we were ever really back. Dandelions trail their contagious spirit for miles behind us. I first left Ohio years ago, half-hearted and without a god. But your brother still lives there, your mother, too—a small house outside Columbus: flat yard, small garden where you used to sit, dreaming of the edges of a still-green world, the tomato plants wrapped around sticks, pushing towards the sky. The billboards remind us about Jesus Christ; white highway crosses remind us of the human dead. I capture them in what will be grainy photos as night falls. We hit Indiana before midnight, sliding our fingers across the wrinkled map, our way to the West marked with a Sharpie, a dark blue path of how to get from here to there.
There’s trouble. With an engine light blinking, we drive through the yellow state too fast to say we were ever really back. Dandelions trail their contagious spirit for miles behind us. I first left Ohio years ago, half-hearted and without a god. But your brother still lives there, your mother, too—a small house outside Columbus: flat yard, small garden where you used to sit, dreaming of the edges of a still-green world, the tomato plants wrapped around sticks, pushing towards the sky. The billboards remind us about Jesus Christ; white highway crosses remind us of the human dead. I capture them in what will be grainy photos as night falls. We hit Indiana before midnight, sliding our fingers across the wrinkled map, our way to the West marked with a Sharpie, a dark blue path of how to get from here to there.
Maggie Glover
Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, Maggie Glover earned a BA from Denison University in Granville, Ohio, and an MFA from West Virginia University, where she was awarded the James Paul Brawner Poetry Award in 2007. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry has appeared in Verse Daily, The Journal, Ninth Letter, Smartish Pace and other literary journals. Currently, she lives in San Francisco, CA.
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