On the Road & Like a Ship

Victoria Mikael

On the Road  

We check out at noon and sing across the Autostrada to Sonny

& The Sunsets and Labi Siffre — you love Bless the Telephone 

and Some Strange Rain by Cotton Jones. I play My Brave Face

and scream it till I cry.  

You don’t notice cause you’re four and pointing at the sky.  

We agree Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise kids and decide

all these old pink houses are, as we lean with the roads, 

and watch like the movies  

a tapestry of greens and golds in the quilted hills, 

smear past us in formless watercolor blurs,  

all too fast to memorize with a heavy  

bare foot on the gas.  

We talk at length about the changing winds,  

Pippi’s monkey and her horse,  

the word for ‘strength'  

in Italian (it’s LA FORZA),  

and ponder how much we love  

Mother Nature;  

You ask where she sleeps, 

“In the Earth, babe.”  

“She’s really kind of everywhere.”  

“I was talking about Pippi,” I hear you say.  

“Oh. In the Earth too, inside her house,  

feet on the pillow, probably still in her shoes.” 

Like A Ship

Like a ship, we cut through green-jelly seas, past ranges of mountains,

and forests of trees, a spaciousness widened in humming off-key —

we even sometimes did so courageously.

My daughter took photograph blinks with her eyes, hiking then dancing

beneath tangled blue skies.

Hours dozed to months till

we boarded tin can rattles home;

Howling down tracks in bunks heading back, we said we were sleepier than sloths

but happier than clams,

and named our feet

Wink, Stink, Rank, and Stank.

We heard a narrator reckon over earthquake, wheels, and engine

—she hailed from Oklahoma or maybe a Dakota—had chimes in the lace of her words;

and when they lowered four octaves, we leaned quick to the

carpeted wall

of our cabin, pressing cold ears to the hem

of her wisdom: “They do this, the buffalo, they push through every storm, they always do.”

Parting stiff polyester curtains, we watched a cold theater of sleet-pelted streaks of hooves

and resilience,

I saw the awe in my daughter’s eyes rest in their steely, patient grit

still barreling forth.

“That’s us, mom.”