Lead foot in a Lincoln, nothing stops an object
so completely in motion.
My father has seen cornfields bigger than
the sheeted sea of my bed,
vast as ever, vaster without him.
He used to sit on the edge of my bed
and talk about the sky.
He’d throw constellations like pop-flies
through the windows,
stipple clouds with his swollen hands.
Children listen to sky stories as long
as they end in sunrises.
I didn’t beg the curtain of dawn from
his grinning mouth—
I wanted something newer than mornings.
My father isn’t new anymore but his car is,
black and big-rimmed.
He rattles a century of coins across
Pennsylvania,
shaking them loose every mile.
I watch him in the curve of the Earth now,
a flickering corona.
He is the reaching horizon or someone
reaching for the horizon,
loosed by the wind and a rest-stop coffee.
I think he might still sing with the radio
like the leather seat is me.
I think he hears the hills sing their mappings
in return, their topography,
the echo of blue dreams in the brush.
Men can fly in the open like this,
wingtips splayed.
They tell as many stories of the sky
as the hot asphalt
is willing to listen to.
Dina Folgia is an MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University. She was an honorable mention for the 2021 Penrose Poetry Prize, and a 2020 AWP Intro Journals Project nominee. Her Her work, which has been nominated for Best of the Net and the AWP Intro Journals Project, has appeared in Ninth Letter, Dunes Review, Stonecoast Review, Sidereal Magazine, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, and others. She is a poetry reader for Blackbird and Storm Cellar. Keep up with her work at https://dinafolgia.com/