Driving to Your Parents’ for the Holidays

Contributor: Kevin Casey

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We marked the spot in the loden sky
where the sun should have been --
driving north along the road’s cracked tongue,
dry despite the rain the dawn had staunched.
Our words were a frail scaffolding
of cane and rush to brace civility,
courteous phrases filling in spaces,
falling and rising with the radio’s
rambling, neutral testimony.

Through the slag piles of motels and gas stations,
gray-bricked, neon-smeared, past mute traffic lights
that mouthed no warnings, the car dragged along
beyond the city’s bitter breath, beyond
the pale afternoon, each staring ahead
at our own horizon. Their fist of driveway
reached from its roots to pull us toward
the commotion and the misplaced care
of that house, into the waking for what
had finally expired on our drive north.


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Kevin Casey is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts, and received his graduate degree at the UConn. He currently teaches literature at a small university in Maine, where he enjoys fishing, snowshoeing and hiking.