Eating the Miles

Nobody could pack a car trunk like he could, a wall of oddments shaped fitly together tighter than dick’s hatband, with no room for even a mouse fart. Then he would hold the needle at 60, claiming the Ford Fairlane would eat the two-lane miles all the way to Daytona, and in the dark of the back seat I would wonder why we couldn’t just eat 80 miles of the twelve hours to the beaches with just a whiff of condensed milk at the Okefenokee coffee stop gators out there in the swamp to get to stingrays and sharks, palm trees, and corn dogs on the boardwalk, the toe-pulling, once-a-year fishing dawns when the sky was creamsicle, the red dust of two-a-day football practices left behind.

This was over fifty years ago dreamed of again last night, the Spanish moss now hanging gray as an old man’s hair.

William Greenway’s 13th collection, As Long As We’re Here, is from FutureCycle Press. He has won the Helen and Laura Krout Memorial Poetry Award, the Larry Levis Editors’ Prize from Missouri Review, the Open Voice Poetry Award from The Writer's Voice, the State Street Press Chapbook Competition, an Ohio Arts Council Grant, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and was Georgia Author of the Year. Publications include Poetry, American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Missouri Review, Georgia Review, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and Shenandoah. Greenway is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Youngstown State University, and now lives in Ephrata, Pennsylvania.