Sugar Hits the Highway
It’s an old road, not a long one
but tedious at night: home
to abandoned home. Sugar visits
the Paradise Truck Stop,
buys a Coke and takes her change
from the Pakistani counterman.
In the lot, a baby sparrow
shivers its wings and gapes, then hops
and flaps following
what must be its mother.
Sugar drives the rest of the way
(one more hour) with no music on,
turns up her headlights as the twilight
falls, alert for deer. Once, a doe
bounded out before her
so close she thought she heard it breathe.
Sixty-five and flying.
Sugar will arrive on time.
Anne Haines' poems have recently appeared in a number of literary journals (both in print and online), including Calyx, Cortland Review, Rattle, and Poetry Midwest, as well as in anthologies including Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology, (University of Illinois Press, 2004). Her poem "O" was named as one of three Honorable Mention awards in the Thomas Merton Foundation's 2006 "Poetry of the Sacred" contest. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where she is currently a staff member in the Indiana University Libraries. (ahaines@gmail.com)