I wandered the desert for forty years and all I got was this lousy t-shirt
Nikki Smith

           But that was then. Now it is only
the highway thundering under us two chapped-lipped pilgrims,

speckled with bedbug bites and motel hickeys. The unblinking sky gazes
down at its reflection in the grease puddle on the turnpike.

You say, give it up, I was only eight! I haven’t
looked you in the eye since mile 14, when I learned you once aided and abetted

the sun, you holding the magnifying glass as she turned ants to soot smudges.
The past and present

                                     splinter, pieces scattered like ashes beneath underpasses, and one
forgotten behind a certain truckstop bathroom. Remember?

A billboard professes: MYSTERY VORTEX CAVE TOUR, 39 MILES --
                  WHAT SECRETS LURK UNDERGROUND?

                                                       A fair question. I listen for the sound of bison bones
erupting from asphalt and burying a strip mall alive. We stop counting the miles.

So much distance is put to so little use. I flinch at the horror of emptiness, the unbearable
weight of negative space. The wind, searching for something to blow through, asks:

Haven’t we always been strangers in a strange land?
Haven’t we always learned to love this absence in the shape of a home?

Haven’t we always wondered
              how many miles to Heaven?

Nikki Smith (SC '25) is a poet, insomniac, podcast addict, and part-time female from Boulder, CO.