a. Driving Home from the Night Shift, Our Mother
Listens to Hank Williams’ “Lost Highway”
She cracks the window,
letting the cold air
slap her awake. Cranking
the radio, she sings
along as she leans
into the burn of Tiger
Balm, her shift,
like her body, a sharpening
of drill bits, the break
room doors. Soon,
she’ll enter the house
before anyone is awake.
This is her time
when everything is still,
when she could be
anything—a thief,
a mouse. Alone,
she’ll wipe coffee rings
from counters, scrub
sinks, floors. Love,
she’d tell you, is work, and work
is what remains
when she leans into
a sleep she can
almost taste, when
our father like the dawn
rises to slip
his arm around her waist.
b. My First Boyfriend and I Slow Dance to Jeff Buckley’s
Cover of Hank Williams’ “Lost Highway”
This new voice is the old
voice of wanting
what you already have.
It marks me like
pressed hands in wet
cement, leaves me
warm against a boy
in a dorm room
damp with the musk
of hair gel,
drugstore rubbers
and knock-off Calvin Klein.
This is not romance.
This is not a story
of easy need, though
there’s cheap beer
on the dresser,
rumpled white sheets
on his unmade bed.
Anything could happen—
his mother could call,
his roommate
could walk in the door, or
we could flinch,
dropping down as we inch
into each other, the track
on repeat: Now, boys, don’t
start your ramblin’ round . . .
c. Encore: Months Before His Overdose, Hank Williams Sings “Cold,
Cold Heart” in 1952 on The Grand Ole Opry—YouTube, 2021
Here, as if brought to
life, the echo of some
lost world: this skinny
lightning-voiced angel
with his white cowboy
hat askew. Like death,
the internet, I’ve read,
is a ghostly well,
ever-expanding grave-
yard of last breaths.
Is this, at last, what
we’re meant to become—
Hank’s blazing eyes,
soulful black windows?
He sings and sings,
Byzantium’s golden bird.
Or is this Christ’s after-
life, gates ajar? Now,
colorless, Hank strums
his phantom guitar.
He stares. He blinks
and grins. He feels no pain.
Strange beauty in the lie,
this screen between
what’s twice alive but
dead, what never ends.
When he stops, I click
back: he sings again.
