Two Poems

Toward Center

Something about travel
makes us lighter. We drive
to Missouri, and I discover 

prairies. There is space
for doubt in the Northern plains.
Space for undoing. When I say 

expansion, this is what I mean:
Iowa, full of grain silos
and white houses. Iowa, 

wide and unmoving. We are lost
somewhere near Des Moines,
and everything 

is cornfields and yellow flowers
in highway medians. Wherever
we are going, it is golden.

Letter for Anyone

I miss you most at night
and when the morning glories 

close. The sky sounds like
an ocean here. At home,

like a highway. I haven’t seen
a lily in this town, but every day 

I watch the river stretching
toward its own end. 

Maybe you will dream
about the mountain tonight. 

Maybe black bear cubs
and caddisflies will swarm 

around your bed. Listen:
the moon folds inward, slowly,
the rain cradles near us.

---

Michelle Reed is a Michigan native working as a freelance writer and editor in Chicago. Her work has appeared in The Albion Review, Air Poetry, and The Columbia College Literary Review. She earned her MA in English from Bucknell University last spring. In her spare time, she edits Pink Slayer, an online feminist magazine.