Blue Book: Touring Information for the Year 1916

Abstract

Blue Book:Touring Information for the Year 1916 Bryan Head (bio) The book says past Platte River we'll find a diner. Then three general stores. Then a lake that's probably frozen. Important things. A hotel waits three miles into Denver with ice water ready at the door. Up four floors a room, a bed. Sheets pressed fresh enough to seem frozen. Back home, my wife gets dizzy in the heat. It sits thick, mosquito-wet on all the bedroom windows. My wife says she can't be there anymore, sweating until her hands shake, the warmth of our bodies at arm's length at all times. I love my wife. I showed her the ice trucked in to our home for her baths in the summer. I show her winter here in Denver. She sits right here beside me in the passenger seat. She feels the slates of cold air brush over the car. No steam on anyone's hair. No holes— fist-sized or bigger—in any of the walls, in fact no walls at all while on the road. [End Page 83] The book says five feet past the hotel bed, snowflakes petaled in the window. Fifty miles past the window a mountain capped in milk. I say Imagine: honey here in your tea, my hand on top of hers as the engine opens wide. Her eyes drift anywhere out the window, as I say I've made her her own breeze. I say look, the country moves through your hair like a comb. Look, all you need is the book, the book says, and good tires. We have the freedom to leave to anywhere, from anywhere. Step out. Look, step out into your new life. Just out there. Just out and over. Then out and over. [End Page 84] Bryan Head Bryan Head is a poet from Asheville, North Carolina. His poems have appeared in the New England Review, Georgia Review, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. He holds an mfa from the University of Maryland and teaches English at the Franklin School of Innovation in Asheville. Copyright © 2020 University of Nebraska Press