The Great American
by Gwen Wille

Five hundred years after the whole
Columbus thing, we’re cantering
up I-25, CO-bound, six days on the road
already, road-stoned, full of fast
food bun and breast.  Out
here, there isn’t much else
to do but talk and stare out the dirty
window and not notice that Gaucho
has been spinning since Algodones.
    My duty
is to keep an eye out for state
troopers. You’re just the king
of the highway strip.  And why
not annex all the places we’ve yet
to see, all the big and wide and god
damned but aren’t they far

gone.

If we hadn’t brought so little,
it wouldn’t have made it back.
If we hadn’t been so—
we wouldn’t have.

 

 

That Time at Mt. Cook

The dead woman’s den is stacked
high with bibles, each the taking
of a hotel stay, summer eighty-
two and the times before—or
sometimes the Witnesses
she didn’t turn away.  She never
went to church.  They piled to blot
out her dead man’s life.

 

But what
of that long flight
to the bottom:

 

there were ridges like pews, all
of it so green, despite the winter.
How she loved those people, so
kind weren’t they, and she promised
she’d return, to stay—maybe.
Here are the souvenir tiepins
from Auckland, Wellington.
These go to charity.  And the dead

 

woman’s blue Buick is sold
at auction (low-miled for the age)
to pay for her attorneys, the grave
plot, some sandwiches and wine.
She’d eaten lamb on toast in the blot
of the mountain, five years after
her dead man was due

to retire, just like they’d said.

 

GWEN WILLE lives and works in West Chester, PA. She studied writing at the University of New Mexico. Her work has appeared in Philadelphia Stories and the second Best of Philadelphia Stories Anthology, and is forthcoming in Divine Dirt Quarterly and Willows Wept Review. In her spare time, she swims laps and attends indie rock shows.

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