Driving Through Wyoming, Listening to the Radio by Sophie Klahr

Burrs, creeks, elms….    here are some more things I like:   

  the words antidote and thistle. Embers.  

Each pillaged and blown-out motel along

state roads. How someone in a parking lot

asks how much I want for the faded globe

in my passenger seat. The world, I say.  

How it seems the town where a young man was

crucified all those years ago became

gentle. The idea of deep time is

that we keep nothing, it just is what it

is. It is what it is—this too I like.

The friar’s idea of The One Sadness.

God shed America—the boy being

dragged, naked: the body all our bodies.

Sophie Klahr is the author of Meet Me Here At Dawn (YesYes Books, 2016) and the chapbook _____ Versus Recovery (Pilot Books, 2007). Her poetry appears in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, AGNI, and other publications. She lives mostly in California and Nebraska.