Devolution

Just realized a poem of mine has been out for a couple of months in a great little literary review, Gyroscope, but I lost it in all the Covidity. Here it is:


Devolution 


The road is narrow
It is dark and Lisa drives
the Volkswagen slowly away
from the writers’ conference
I sit behind and light her cigarettes

Every few hundred feet our headlights
bounce back at us, reflected
off a patch of fog on the road
then brightens again
along the winding highway

We are driving
to a town called Marshall
where the houses sit on stilts
the bar leans out over the bay
Lisa says we’ll find men who won’t judge us
on our poetic style

Beyond the signpost
fog obscures the bay to our left.
walling the road in front of us
and I think -- So this is what it’s like
at the bottom of the ocean
dense and we grow fins.