The paths we take to come home again are longer
than those same roads are away. They arc, electricity
lighting the sullen midnight dark, stretching out in
the dim spaces between stars. Maybe tires move
faster, you say, when they’re taking us away. When
they aren’t weighed down with our failures. These
paths drag years between us, every road leading back
to you. I left so that I could breathe into dust, form life
like I was made of more than this dirt and the things
that lurk inside, but we settle to survive, spores landing
in warm, wet earth. So when I feel older than the roads
we drove away on I think of you, feel something chanting
in my veins that shifts and quakes. I believed that I was
stable, but now I don’t remember when we weren’t waves
breaking on the shore. Grandfather was right when he said
things slip back into place, when you aren’t looking, they shift
and change. He said nothing breaks forever. My roots have
not been moved. He said dogs always know where home is.
Header photograph © Lannie Stabile.
Betty Stanton is a writer who lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work has appeared in various journals including Reservoir and Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry and is forthcoming in several other publications and anthologies. She received her MFA from The University of Texas at El Paso.