Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2011

Fairy Tale for Girls who Gather Maps  
Sandy Longhorn

Once there was a girl, the daughter
of a man who drove a truck
the long length of a long country.

Each trip ended with the blast
of an air horn and the gift
of another battered map.

Before reading words, the girl
could trace the lines that led
out of their flat, middle land

over mountains and into cities
that edged an ocean or border town.
As she grew, she made a ritual

of folding and refolding, every crease
a spell she cast against failed brakes,
high speeds, and falling rocks.

It was the coastal highway, though,
that did her in when she herself
got behind the wheel, her father’s

truck long since gone back to the bank,
the man himself wrecked by a disease
no enchantment could prevent. She packed

her maps and one bag of summer clothes,
gunning the engine as she turned
onto the icy, gravel road. Too much

to resist, all those sunny twists and curves
hugging an endless horizon to the west,
her father’s stories humming in her ear.

 

Sandy Longhorn is the author of Blood Almanac (Anhinga Press), which won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry. New poems are forthcoming or have appeared recently in Cincinnati Review, New South, The Rumpus, South Dakota Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Pulaski Technical College where she also runs the Big Rock Reading Series. Longhorn lives in Little Rock, AR, is an Arkansas Arts Council fellow, and blogs at Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty.