by Esther Mills

Created on: September 08, 2009

The Trucker's Daughter

As familiar as her mother's voice, the highway's hum. Her nightlight,

the green glow of the instrument panel, its gauge faces unblinking

through miles and hours. After her last eye-flutter the alien sentinels

burned still in her lids, their strangeness disconcerting, reassuring.

Stranger still was the return of home and land-legs,

an immobile bed, and the neighborhood that looked the same

when she awoke. But not strange, the mournful hum of highway

past her window, lullabying her to sleep.

She craved moving objects, dreamed recurrently of lonely

byroads that led in fantasy to Shangri-La and Eden...

through years and worlds even now a solitary road at night

could wind a gypsy twitch through her adult-ness, kidnap her senses,

make her check the rear view mirror and wonder what would

happen if tonight, while the children slept, she drove on

until the gas was gone, until they arrived as unknowns in

an unknown land, with each other as their sole possessions

and the horizon their inheritance.

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