Lynn Powers  © 2006 All Rights Reserved

Driving to the James Wright Poetry Festival and Coming Home

For Sal

We packed our poems and drove along the river
looking for the sign for Martins Ferry
and you were hearing stories of my father
and morning glory fields in morning where we

lived when I was five. The way you drive,
so clean between the lines, unlike the water
running brown between its banks, it will arrive
with more than when it started. What I saw turn

was time, the clocks on buildings old with brick,
the towns, the child who plays in morning glories
grown, and wheels are spinning forward quick
and know where they are going, over stories.

You turned to tell me It will be alright.
We stopped for water, went on in the night.

Karen Schubert
Copyright © 2006

 

KAREN SCHUBERT makes pies in her great-grandmother’s kitchen in northeast Ohio. She’s a graduate student in the English department at Youngstown State University and recipient of YSU’s Hare Award for poetry. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Mid-America Poetry Review, Primavera, Versal, the Cooweescoowee, PL&LR, the Fourth River, Vision-International, YSU’s Penguin Review and others.

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