Driving Through

safe car on safe road and highway switchbacks
baby girl with those gray wristbands on
plastic pellet resting between tendons
keeping her stomach still or at least stiller

than the black car and its sticky summer seats
tight gridlines on the backs of our thighs
little white house peeking up at her
from below the grey metal guardrails

little creek smaller than the river she knows
playing peekaboo with the swaying road
carved strip in the mountain on the other side
she knows the word logging thanks to

Richard Scarry’s overall’d cat-boy
but maybe he’s a girl like her who didn’t
know the dirt turns such a yellow-red color
when they take the trees away

and string those wires along like
a tree-lined set of hand-over-hand bars
and it’s still light out and they haven’t
stopped for lunch and her brother

wonders where the mountain’s trees went
and wonders where all the houses’ people are
while his mom looks out the window and
says how beautiful it is along that road

and her voice sounds like a book’s end
that he doesn’t understand and he’d like
to play in the creek he keeps seeing but
they don’t stop till the houses are gone

when the bracelets stop working
because the road is just like his sister’s
belly and nothing like that stays still
when they have other places to go