After Scheduling the Vaccine
Jessica Purdy
Image by Huey Images
“But that doesn’t make the road an allegory.” —Tony Hoagland, “A Color of the Sky”
Bread and butter and babies
keep appearing in my dreams.
A baby sleeps in a laundry sink
full of water with a mask over
her nose and mouth. This is how
she keeps warm. I wake, stretch,
and feel a twinge in my back.
Later, on the highway, I feel
a warm breeze. It’s the first
day of spring and I fear change.
The push to get things back
to normal makes me anxious.
I like it in here without any
competition. Now, spring
will bring people out to breathe
the air. The latent buds
will turn to leaves. Pussy willows
abide the cold until they can’t
take it anymore and unfurl.
Even the early winds have subsided
and now March feels like
an oncoming train. Which reminds
me of my friend’s dog
who wouldn’t get off the tracks
no matter how he screamed.
There are some pictures
I don’t want to paint. Back
to the highway though.
I have feelings when I’m driving.
Always looking to the trees
for a hawk’s calm white chest.
Pigeons quotidian on their electric wires.
The grackles swarm through
the traffic lights on 108, a natural
neon sunset their backdrop.
They shift and break like schools
of fish. I always say this about them
but I can’t think of a better way
to describe it. Later, I find out
a swarm of grackles is called a plague.
The air is water and we are all
swimming under bridges, merging
into currents, avoiding Walmart whales
barreling past. In darkening evenings
when the sky leaves behind
a cobalt horizon, sodium lights
of gas stations, the yellow and red
oases of fast food chains, it
gives me a lust for leaving. When
my heart has pains
I wonder what my leaving will do.
Jessica Purdy
Jessica Purdy is the author of STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House, both released by Nixes Mate in 2017 and 2018. Sleep in a Strange House was a finalist for the NH Literary Award for poetry. She is also the author of the chapbook Learning the Names (Finishing Line Press 2015). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals including The Night Heron Barks, Radar, SoFloPoJo, Harpy Hybrid, Lily Poetry Review, One Art, Poemeleon, and Museum of Americana. She is poetry editor for the anthology Ten Piscataqua Writers. Find her on Twitter @JessicaPurdy123, Instagram @jessica.purdy.735, and on her website, jessicapurdy.com.