The Drive

Grampa tells me as we drive
       the snow brushed back roads
       of North Idaho, how he took my mother

on a drive along the same unpainted asphalt paths,
       the night before she married her first husband,
       so he could explain to her it wasn?t too late to back out,

that it would be ok, and even preferable for her to call it off,
       better to give the marriage an abortion, than to shove paper vows
       in a shredder, to erase her name from the pledge. She felt

she owed it to the mystery man, the man I have only met once
       on a visitation in Portland, when I was six...so she spoke
       the words before the Bishop, slashed her name, placed her future

on the contract line. If she hadn?t, he would never have donated
       his sperm, his genes. I would never have been thrust,
       screaming into this world, in that hospital by the Kootenai River.

Sometimes, I think that would have been ok.


Nathan Tompkins

? June, 2016-Dirty Chai