Route 9W by Christine Potter

doesn’t take you where it did: to scarlet
picnic tables under green neon at Annie’s
Snack Shack and tall bottles of beer icy-
wet as bare-handing snowballs. To onion

rings on sheets of red and white wax paper
in plastic baskets. Hoyer’s bright old sign
with the four-foot-high soft-serve cone has
unplugged its electric buzz, and this road’s

lost itself to no place special: nail salons,
gun shops, chain drug stores faced in fake
antique brick. The summer cottages down
by Rockland Lake are winterized or gone,

front porches masked-up in vinyl siding, AC
blasting the breath of weary ghosts. We’re
all of us tired: beyond fireflies, not ready for
crickets. We all need a vacation and nobody

takes much of one anymore, not here. No
dads down in Manhattan send the wife and
kids up the Hudson for open windows and
music echoing from a lakeside dance hall—

music that could inspire anyone to grow up
and want that fun, that fun exactly. It didn’t
work out that way. We went out for a drive—
hey, anyone would have—and ended up here.



Christine Potter is the poetry editor of Eclectica Magazine. She has poetry forthcoming in Tar River and Grain. Her poems have recently been in Rattle, The McNeese Review, Cloudbank, ONE ART, and featured on ABC Radio News. She's the author of the young adult series The Bean Books, and her latest poetry collection, on Kelsay Books, is Unforgetting.