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our children's children
by Kelly Jensenin north platte at 8 pm the woman in red and her assistant in white smile, escort us into their hotel with toothpaste white teeth, sparkling, sparkling white. fifteen hours, straight, car ride from crow reservation to Sheridan to lost springs to Cheyenne to Denver. here. in Nebraska. she gives me free postcards, the one, all black, desolate, says welcome to north platte, says, here you can see the stars, says, free coffee and sympathetic looks for us, us weary travelers receive a symphony of the midwest. late. our bags, deposited in the room. away from the road, away from people, away, away into the dark of the postcard, of the night, of the streetlights illuminating a strip of highway with the numbers half eroded, faded into the green. exchange, memories, the road, the rumble of the car and tumbleweeds in the grill and i-80, never wrong, never wrong, the shot of shortest distance between. in exchange, we make love in the hotel bed, in the sheets that have seen any and everything, here in Nebraska, here where the midwest offers sanctity, the tv before us, before us as we twist and navigate the roads and mountains in the mass of cotton, mass of starchy industrial washed, dried, we see in Chechnya, murder. murder in Chechnya, children desecrated, we were going to sneak a drink of wine or two but now, death, now dark, now starless, no north platte, no sacredness, no screen blank in the corn rows and faded numbers of nowhere Nebraska, no fertile crescent, our bodies no longer, no longer little children going to school but my little blue dishes shattered indescribable under the passenger seat. 10/10/2005 Posted on 03/06/2009
Copyright © 2024 Kelly Jensen
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