Transamerican Road Dream

By Tiffany Aurelia

golden-shovel, after Joy Harjo

I
dreamt we were back in your middle-of-nowhere Ohio college town, we argued,
shortly, in the car because you missed a wrong turn, you wore a coat with
three holes patched up by my old socks, and it was the
winter but we were from a tropical country so the snow fell like music
against our arms, the Kentucky cold as
foreign as a pinprick of stars, later I
squeezed across from you in the diner booth, our cups filled
with strawberry pop and a plate of the
daily Tennessee special—half biscuit, half brisket—the jukebox
playing a song that we would later love, not just yet, paid with
half the dimes
tucked between twenties in
your back pocket, saved up from your library job this June,
because we didn’t have much money then, forty
summers ago, everything measured in ungraspable years
and twenty-three-hour road trips and
old Hondas with half-broken headlights, frost fading until we
crossed into Georgia, the warmth in mid-December still
as clear in my mind as fresh snow, pearling; I want
to believe in memory that is not afraid to give justice
to its bearers, to give mercy in its fullness, for this is all we
had and needed and now you are
shaking me awake as we reach the Sunshine State, still
clutching a steering wheel and a dream of our America.

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Tiffany Aurelia is a South-East-Asian writer and student from Indonesia. She has won runner-up of The Kenyon Review's Patricia Grodd Prize and the Woorila Louis Rockne Prize. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Diode, Up the Staircase Quarterly, The Shore, and elsewhere. She loves ocean swims and strawberry matcha.