Alice

by Travis Mossotti

Walking down the highway’s soft shoulder
on the way to you, I passed a single lichen
covered boulder the color of your eyes.
I brushed it with the backs of my fingers
half-believing you watched from the pines
like an owl. A quarter-moon stalked
from a distance, and I imagined you, alone,
standing in a doorframe, wrapped in a quilt
with a cigarette lazing between your fingers.
Maybe it was the seam of your black stocking
I trailed through Appalachia, chicken dinner
cooling on a billboard, the sky opening up
its empty skull, gravel dust powdering
my unkempt hair with the same dull ivory
of the letter you sent telling me not to come,
for the sake of your children who by then
were bean stalks winding their way up your legs.
Half the state of Tennessee still lay between us.
I unrolled my sleeping bag on top of a flattened
patch of thistle and saw grass near the trees
and dreamed I was riding a boxcar through
a country of forgotten languages—a field
of cotton on the verge of telling me a secret.

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