My daughter is driving
across the continent, eating cheddar
in Wisconsin, waking to a cougar’s yellow
rasp, sleeping tentless
in a corn field where a mysterious
insect leaves a sore story of welts
over her face, her neck –
she is off my radar, and it feels like
part of me is floating off the map,
past the flannel of sleep, the safety
of novels—I hear the wind over her phone,
constant. The wind, her voice
informs me, never stops blowing in South Dakota
where the Black Hills are not really black,
but green and grey like Cezanne’s mountains.
Her hair glistens with a mid-American
sweat I have never felt, her car
runs into the different hours
of a different night. We have
lost the clock between us, the familiar
gone strange. Prairie so flat, she says,
you can see the sun for a long time.
I feel something flatten out between us—
and ease into a rhythm where the plains
of her life, of mine, drift
buoyant, open, rising without words,
hours, or habits—
New country.
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Raphael Kosek’s poems and nonfiction have appeared in Poetry East, Catamaran, and many other journals. Her chapbook, Rough Grace, won the 2014 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Prize. She won the 2019 Bacopa Literary Review’s poetry contest and Eastern Iowa Review’s 2016 nonfiction prize. American Mythologywas recently released from Brick Road Poetry Press. She teaches English at Marist College where her students keep her real. She is the 2019-2020 Dutchess County Poet Laureate.
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