Two Poems

LeeAnn Pickrell

The Dodge Dart

We drove a red Dodge Dart
convertible on that three-week trip
when I was five and thought forever
was how long it took to the next stop.
My brother and I, our legs bare, stuck
to the vinyl in those days
before mandatory seatbelts, when
I could lie down in the back,
my head on my favorite squirrel pillow
and my mother’s lap. In so many
photographs commemorating that trip—
on canyon edges, in front of the carved
granite faces of dead presidents,
by Magic Mountain, my brother and I
look dazed, my hair pixie short and
his shirt always rumpled and half
tucked in. At the motel each night
we briefly came to life, when we had a pool
and shuffleboard and argued over who got
the rollaway while our parents drank
their carefully packed flasks of gin
and scotch. Each day my brother threatened
to eject me from the car, said the
cigarette lighter was really an eject button
connected to me—no matter where I sat.
And I amused myself by daring him
to press it, secretly hoping to be shot
out of that car, into the sky, and home
from that trip that even forty years later
we can’t stop talking about. As if it were
the only thing that ever happened to us.

***

Love Notes

Every night before she left the nursing home, my mother wrote my father a note on a piece of paper torn from a spiral-bound notebook. Darling, I love you. You’re my sweetheart and best friend. I’ll be back early tomorrow morning. She would read it to him, standing next to his bed, and then place the note on the tray table pulled close to his side. She’d show him where she put it, though he could no longer read. And at night, while she was home in a king-size bed he would never come back to, the aide read my father the note to remind him, when the darkness seemed too close, that my mother would be back, in just a few hours, with the light of day.

If she’s not napping, LeeAnn Pickrell has probably just woken up from a nap or will be napping soon. She drinks only strong coffee and enjoys twisting her body into odd shapes in yoga; of course, her favorite pose is savasana. In her next life, if she doesn’t come back as a cat, she wants to be a namer of nail polish colors. She’s currently a Bogota Blackberry; in truth, though, she’s more a Lincoln Park After Dark girl, as it suits her poetic sensibilities.
leeannpickrell@sbcglobal.net

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