Blue Highway

In certain lives you may incarnate
as a person who does not see
every color. Carnation: an arcane word
for flesh, from the French.

But in this life, please be thrilled. Smoke
the bees, dust the parlor. Set the table,
seal the honey. What happens twice,
also happens once. Walk slowly

to the graveyard. This state is spread
flat and wide as a prayer mat, so
stretch the soul, lick the ground. What is now
rose, once was red. I swear

down the blue highway, there is
someone else whose blue looks like your
blue. I swear, they couldn’t even be
there if that weren’t true.

I can prove it: when the English gave up
sending the twenty toes and
twenty fingers of the sainted to the sanctified,
they took up the poets. Even Byron had only one heart.

So! Into the ether, into the bleak.
Do your finest to be constantly adrift
and perpetually blind. Eventually, you too
may be buried at sea—

If I ever get to an incarnation that I recognize,
I’d like to lie on my back in one of those fields
in Iowa, looking up into the inverted ocean,
into the nothing and the everything
that in this life I only

drove under.

Candice Wuehle is a Master’s Candidate at the University of Minnesota currently pursing a degree in literature. She hails from a variety of Middle Western towns, but mostly Iowa City, Iowa, where she has studied at the Writer’s Workshop (summer sessions). Her work has appeared in The Honeyland Review and EARTHWORDS and is forthcoming in Gigantic Sequins.

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