Assistant Editor Chelsea Whitton: A Midwestern georgic? A pastoral on wheels? This sensuous, image-rich poem engages with the pleasures of driving down back roads, as it marvels at the passage of time and the body’s relationship to the landscape that shapes it. Like the father’s barreling truck, Wagner’s writing is full of music and motion and torque. It moves fast through its space and covers much green ground.
To hear Sara read her poem, click below:
Like I Won’t Take Something from You
I bounced to you in the back of my father’s truck,
over the gravel roads stretching into the cornfields,
so late in the evening no one was outside
on the porch, swinging in the night—only the crickets
and cicadas, the lambs bleating, my father, lit
cigarette ashing back into my hair. You say
you love my hair, how golden it is like new hay
rolled into tiny suns, the ones we pass on the road now,
I next to you in your brand new car, how my hair looks
almost copper, like pipes—listen, I still feel that lit
bit of ash, the ember flung back, how
my hair was on fire, the truck was on fire. My father
still driving with Guns N’ Roses so loud he couldn’t hear
or feel me rolling around, that I’d turned
into a combine harvester, my teeth horizontal and so straight—
this is how I came to wear my hair like this,
the way you love it, the way it blows in the evening
wind almost like ready stalks.
Sara Moore Wagner lives in West Chester, Ohio, with her husband and three small children. She is the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award, and the author of the chapbook Hooked Through (Five Oaks Press, 2017). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals including Tar River Poetry, Harpur Palate, Western Humanities Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and Nimrod. Find her at www.saramoorewagner.com.
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