WINTER ROAD TRIP

We are driving down I-49, unzipping the countryside in his 2024 Ford Tundra—☆1794 Edition
in mesquite brown. A spraying rain and spermy droplets squirm up the windshield by the
thousands, little wet towns like mine so still maybe no one inside them, ribs of a sports car on
three wheels and a rim, shredded trampoline outside an ice-cream-striped double-wide and an expansive ranch in muscadine red, white post-and-rails running miles ahead and hundreds head
of sleepy Angus gnawing on cudded indifference. Bottled water between my knees which
would’ve been whiskey in ’96 when cigarettes meant more than gas station meat pies, when the
motor was held together with wire, when $300 could change our lives at Christmas time. Now
I’m holding his cold hand across the console where our phones are charging and our wrists are
bent at strange angles and I’m thinking how it would’ve been him and me origami parked in the
thick of the pine trees on my lunchbreak from the Dairy Queen, steam fogging the web-cracked
windows and the gas meter on E.

Lola Willis (she/her) lives and writes in Leesville, Louisiana with her husband and six children. She lost her transgender daughter, Rain, to suicide in May 2024, which fuels her poetry and activism for suicide prevention, particularly in the LGBTQ+ community. Her poetry, short stories and parenting articles have appeared in both online and print publications including flashquake, The Danforth Review, The Prairie Review, 318 Central, Boudin and The Delta Review. She published her first collection of work, entitled November Keepsakes, in 2024.