Karen Whittington Nelson
Karen Whittington Nelson writes from her home on a small, Southeast Ohio farm. Her work has been published by Women Speak, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, Main Street Rag, Gyroscope Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Northern Appalachia Review, I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices, and other journals.
Fireflies
Just you and me, before the kids,
coated with Cedar Point’s greasy
sweet dust and a crust of sweat.
Scent of cotton candy clings
to your hair, the memory
of funnel cake on my breath.
I’m curled into the passenger’s seat,
knees pinned against the dash,
arm out the window, ping of insects
against my palm. This midnight
two-lane, heavy with lonely,
dull as a flat tire. I’m longing for
home’s hills and curves—
thrills without a lap bar,
free, but for the dollar worth of gas
still sloshing in the tank.
We leave behind miles of feed corn
for the novelty of garnered fields
luminous with fireflies.
You hit the gas hard and I snap to.
Off with the headlights, we’re star-
skipping. The firefly glow outside
my porthole no longer Morse Code
dots and dashes, but a cosmos
stitched with moonbeam threads—
too much for my peripheral vision
to sort, but none the less illuminating.
Suddenly, I see beyond ourselves,
past beginning and end and I know
that you will eventually leave.
Even now,
I feel the weight of my thoughts
adding drag to your joy ride,
pulling us back to earth.
