by Brian Simoneau
Halfway home and the sun collapses
into the road ahead, every curve
threatening to wrench away the wheel.
Don’t go, the grass behind a guardrail
calls, nowhere to be but here, so hide
from headlights always in close pursuit.
There is no home to return to, home
the lie layered day by day until
there’s no way of digging deep enough
to extract what it is that fastens
me, to say what chains any of us
to a place we forever circle
like a drain, a hole where once a star
shone, once turned like a god looking back
to drag us along the path we have
no hope of retracing in the dark.
Brian Simoneau is the author of River Bound (C&R Press, 2014), which was chosen for the 2013 De Novo Prize. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, Mid-American Review, RHINO, Southern Indiana Review, and other journals. He lives in Connecticut with his family.