Behind me the moon came up, a bright
sour lemon slice garnishing the cool blue cup
of a sky salt-spangled with stars.

Ever contrary, I drove
over the fly-over states, the dark
bounding ahead of my headlights,
eager and brisk, bristling with frost.

It was too cold to snow – later
I would learn that as I drove it was colder
here than it was on Mars, but it seemed to me
I was my own planet,
the car swaddled in a muggy atmosphere
of coffee steam from a dented gray-green thermos,
cocooned in the safe known orbit of oldies radio, of white
highway lines and the tail-lights of semis.

Fast as I drove, the moon beat me there, creeping out
over the crown of my car, casting a wan grainy glance
over his shoulder at the day, waiting all eager to tuck him
into the layette colored flannel of morning fog.

Jessi Peterson is a children's librarian in Chippewa Falls. She and her husband live just north of Eau Claire in a hand-built hobbit house. For more by and about Jessi go here.

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