Near the Freeway
By Freesia McKee
There’s a city park behind the hospital where your dad is staying. It’s mid-September, one of the last warm weeks, so you take your shoes off to walk barefoot because you still feel half-asleep, seven dragonflies in the airspace above you. Bur oak, a tree you’ve just learned to name. Gaunt black walnuts a few fences from the freeway. Here is a prairie of aster, goldenrod, milkweed, joe pye, species your dad will announce again at another park you’ll take him to, post-hospital, where he’ll note from the vista that he feels “open.” This will be in the future—you don’t yet know when that will be. Here, traffic sounds like a fleet of chainsaws. Here, in-motion automobiles carry a high drone. It doesn’t seem like public parks in Wisconsin should have a traffic vantage this high up, north and south exits looped like an IV tube, the black cord of a heart rate monitor, lines from machines connected to the wall that sing panicked songs you think a bird would never make. The power of seeing everything at once. You run into the remains of an animal matted to the earth, bones gone so all that’s left is white fur and a jutting tooth. Still carrying a thick fragment of stick from the oak. Butterflies popping in as if asking you to follow. Regimented thresholds decay and underneath your feet is something quiet and always there.
Freesia McKee (she/her) writes about place, gender, and genre through poetry, prose, book reviews, and literary criticism. Recent work appears in Fugue, About Place Journal, Porter House Review, and her newest chapbook, Hummingbird Vows. She is an Assistant Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Read more at FreesiaMcKee.com.