8/8/2019 This Ride Has Been a Game of Solitaire

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This Ride Has Been a Game of Solitaire

Jonathan Austin Peacock

8:17AM, Benson, Arizona, I scribbled:

the gauge sits on H and I havent sleptsince Pomona. Taught the desk clerk

the proper way to script a letter J; boughta soft pack of menthols from a machineand prosecuted myself for the longest drag

in the Arizona mid-day sun. This ride has beena game of Solitaire, a stack of peanut buttersandwiches, the aroma of cat piss from the long

journey of the I-5 corridor. So what I can remember

is that the landlord asked for the keysto the old place by mailthat the four-banger

bucked across the desert plainsthat the sonof a bitch overheated before ReddingthatId shoulder-butted a man in his 30s, shot pool alone,

and published a poem on my Blackberry. So what I knowis I escaped, narrowly, by offering to buy him a beerlast night while my wife dreamt of Texas dust clouds

and a warmer climate. So what I know is to over-correctmy balance when Im drunk, or feeling so. So whatI know is that this place is in the in-between,

like the day I took a walk on the path besidethe hospice and my home and told myself to imagineagain. Play favorites. Be wayward. And so this is what

I know, to return east intact and give the way of life that livesthere a chance. That the heat of this menthol cooledmy lips in the summer air. 8:35AM, Benson, Arizona.