Suggestions
Think about wearing a cape. Capes enhance most kinds of pronouncements. Go with the wolf hat, the skull ring, the pants with the fringes. You will never in your life wish for more khakis. Eat the goddamned face off the giants and spit blood parabolas up against a burnt out sky. Run towards the trees and climb to the top and look at the ocean. Sniff too. Sing along to bee buzz and also karaoke drunk on soju and also in your car at stoplights with the windows down and really whenever the mood is jiggling in your lungs. If you still waver, just get the cape. Jump over the old fence. Enjoy spicy curries. Tell a motherfucker they’re wrong when they try and tell a racist joke. Drag that thing heaving over the line, no juice left, everything creaking and exhausted, sun break on land, rum in the veins, and laugh without an inkling of just how ridiculous the clothing, the air, the bird over there, all of it, every piece of it is.
Cross Country
These great stretches, sixteen, eighteen hours, dividers wazed to yellow glazes, undefined, we were quiet because of it, the certitude of movement.
We didn’t know there would be bison, sidling up to the road on the approach to the Grand Canyon.
In Las Vegas we will try — the dream frenzy of light, sensation, stripping off everything that doesn’t pulse or slick out sex. It works. We are careful to cash in, red on your skin, a furious fuck against all the shit we keep promising to forgive.
Nebraska stretches blank. Utah splits and at night the universe hovers and sprawls and there are no other cars, only planets, stars, us, trees, rocks.
A grizzly bear and her cubs, a geyser, a tickle of something greater.
You always ask what I keep hidden. I don’t know. If I could know, this trip, this exposure of us could keep going indefinitely, we could drive circular, end to end like the old people In that town with the natural springs, always out in front of that thing.
Corey Hill is a human rights activist, journalist, parent, and occasional tree climber. On the masthead at Taco Bell Quarterly. Journalism at The Independent, Yes!, Alternet, more. Fiction and poetry at Cordite, Antithesis, The Moth, Sierra Nevada Review, others.