By the Time We Reached Quilcene

“Well she was an American girl / Raised on promises /
She couldn't help thinkin' that there / Was a little more to life / Somewhere else”

— Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “American Girl”

 

 

Sisters and I left our fingernails in the Badlands,
our teeth along a Wyoming roadside,
and our skin in Big Sky Country—
a syzygy of bodily offerings for the road gods.

We summited the Idaho Panhandle
and fortified our naked spines
with pieces of the Rockies.

Dad’s calls were red pushpins
metastasizing in our wake,
asking us to heed his advice—
Buy a bat.

By the time we reached Quilcene
we covered our bodies in succulence
the Olympic Peninsula offered us.

We pitched our tent on a bed
of fern and moss while the boombox
played Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’
“American Girl”

and reimagined the promises
we were raised on, the destinies
preordained by fathers.

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Emma Murray holds an MFA from Oklahoma State University and received an Academy of American Poets Prize in 2016. Her works have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New Territory, Pilgrimage, The RS 500, and The Collapsar. She currently lives in Iowa and teaches at Iowa State University.