Just take the mountain curves
as tightly to the inside and
as fast as surface conditions permit
and the road’s edge
or yellow center line allow
my father was saying,
concentrating on my desire to learn
all the secrets of driving.
What he meant to tell me,
or so I imagine, was stay alert,
that all roads take caution, pose
on-coming lessons, deep curves
impossible to anticipate at any age.
The easy lesson wound down Woodside Road
toward home that summer I was sixteen.
The roads coming made you drive straighter,
beyond anything you could think you wanted,
sometimes away from wherever you intended to go.
Even as you sometimes thrilled
to their terrible ride.
Ed Higgins‘ poems and short fiction have appeared in various print and online journals, including Monkeybicycle, Tattoo Highway, Triggerfish Critical Review, Word Riot, and Blue Print Review, among others. He and his wife live on a small organic farm in Yamhill, OR, where they raise a menagerie of animals, including a whippet, a manx barn cat (who doesn’t care for the whippet), two Bourbon Red turkeys (King Strut and Nefra-Turkey), and an alpaca named Machu-Picchu. Ed teaches writing and literature at George Fox University, south of Portland, OR, and he is also Asst. Fiction Editor for Brilliant Flash Fiction, an Irish-based online flash journal.