I’m bored with the 29 days in February
I want to tell the bus driver about watermelons
trucked from Texas and sold at a farm outside the village,
how I miss the blue of Cathead Bay,
that I’m riding the bus because
I fear running out of toilet paper, and
there’s a sale on Kleenex Double Roll at Wal-Mart.
I start to tell the bus driver
August in Northport
meant spiked watermelon at beach parties
and losing virginity in the sand,
but I fade-off before finishing and
watch the jack-pine and bare tamaracks flash by.
The airbase is a ghost town;
soon couples will pick blueberries
and caress each other with stained fingers
and tongues.
I fear dependence
and public transportation,
and the young man in the back of the bus
who tells about his toilet habits,
how he once shit in the wastebasket
’cause every time the toilet overflowed
his dad strapped him.
I imagine purple welts
and his dog licking his face, but
my discomfort keeps my eyes on the bus driver’s back.
My husband has gone off to trucking school.
To stay warm on long hauls
he’ll wear his company coat.
I’ll curl up with the labs,
wait, take a mental count
of how many rolls of toilet paper remain in the cupboard,
and watch the ice break up on the Escanaba River.
I’ll write poems of love and loss
to read in August when
my mate brings home a truckload of exotic fruits.
Fruits, to suck on the sand shore
beside brown water,
where leeches hide and wood ticks
fall from the trees.
–writtten Kim Nixon
Winner of the Philip M. Legler Memorial Award 1997 at NMU.
First published in The Thaw: A Student Journal of Literature,
Vol 1 Issue I.
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