Westfield, Massachusetts and I Have Been to America’s Drive-in (with introduction by Petra Whitaker)
Each month, the Guest Editor of The Whistling Fire chooses an exemplary piece by an established writer to introduce the month’s theme. This month we are pleased to have two poems by Amy Miller: “Westfield Massachusetts” and “I Have Been to America’s Drive-in.” Poems for July’s issue establish a sense of place, either an actual place or a place in the psyche, and are highly image-driven. Other poems chosen under the theme’s umbrella take an abstract concept and make it palpable through its details.
Congratulations to the finalists,
Petra Whitaker
Westfield, Massachusetts
Sooty red-brick town,
noonday chimneysmoke,
a fire in cold fingers.
Even the snow
is gone to the sunken
bottommarsh of Crane Pond,
to the migrant watertips
of icicles off Granville Gorge.
What would I do here?
Paint ladies’ nails
in a gas-hot shop
out back of the mill?
Marry the man
who owns the Tool & Die,
loan my stepsons money,
write letters in the kitchen
long past the TV’s last breath?
This bristle-backed town,
this crazy little paradise
wants my life.
It calls me to the ice’s edge,
covers me in sleet, tells me
what it could do:
set me down in a sleepy house
with the front porch falling in,
the dog dreaming on the rug.
It says I’ll have to find
my own damned way
to make a living, my own
damned way home if
I have one. It says
I can stay here for a price.
Originally appeared in ZYZZYVA
© 2011 Amy Miller
I Have Been to America’s Drive-in
I have sat in the world’s laziest restaurant
and leaned out of the car,
Jane’s Addiction barking on the speaker overhead.
I have pushed the one giant button
and pushed in my card
and thanked the boy on roller skates
who handed me a bag and drink,
his face incongruously happy in the rain.
I have smelled the warm-baked lust
of hamburger buns, licked
dripped mustard off the heel of my hand
while watching the movie of strip-mall traffic,
Jeeps and pickups and SUVs
accelerating through their days,
the orange-and-blue balloons
of the AT&T store
waving wet over a tea of autumn leaves.
I have taken a bite of burger
and glimpsed a holocaust of cattle,
seen them reduced to bullets
in a twenty-pound PetSmart bag
slung in the back seat
of an ’88 Mazda.
I have seen the redneck men
in T-shirts stuck with rain
drop their bottles
in the trash can decked
with national-park pebbles.
I have plunged the red straw
into a Diet Coke and tasted
cinnamon and baseball,
sat with a plexiglass menu
between me and someone else
I could not see
until she backed out
and set her car on a course toward west
past the giant insistent signs
telling her the thousand things
she had to do
before dinner
and home
and love.
© 2011 Amy Miller
Leave a comment
Filed under Poetry