Approaching City Limits

  Good Friday, Cincinnati

  Driving East on 74,

  we are winding down,

  tired of motion.

  Driving has become

  a force like gravity,

  pulling us with tireless hands,

  setting our pace

  with invisibly fast Mercury feet.

  In the back seat, our only son

  sleeps past towns and the lack of towns.

  Deep in his dreams, Ohio is a distant moon

  he sees between changing seasons.

  We pass a white-steepled church

  shepherding a flock of nearby houses

  haphazard in their placement,

  They appear to be wandering

  in their small valley, looking for a nook

  in the hills, a way out.

  I envision it all covered in nighttime snow,

  decide that is the way some areas should only

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  be seen, despite the brazen clamoring of Spring,

  who has taken advantage of three day's rain

  to smother the highways in a hilly bosom, that is

  overdressed with bright, new adornments of green.

  Mount Airy Forest hovers on the left,

  and seems lower, more earthly on the right.

  The radio station appears and vanishes with each turn,

  gives us gifts of song with ghostly randomness.

  As my husband drives, we are constantly surprised

  by purple trees that seem too bright for Lent.

  Turning the wheel with hand-over-hand care,

  he counts the silent crosses on the roadside,

  as he names the flowers and photos which have been secured

  to their center points, obscuring their bare, white intersections.

  Soon, we will reach our destination. We are getting closer all the time.

  - Kat Isacson