Something Always Holds Us Up
By Joan Kwon Glass
The billboard just before exit 21 displays a photo of Rhonda, a middle-aged woman before weight loss surgery. It promises that in one mile, we will meet a lighter version of her. A church billboard asks if we have suffered enough. I’ve started listening to audiobooks to distract myself from the slow, painful, inching homeward. Today a narrator explains the tendency of ancient peoples to form cultures around rejection. Refusing the fishing canoe or superior farming tool of a neighboring tribe–lineage determined more by what is renounced than what is shared. I am writing this poem about traffic instead of the love poem my partner longs for, and I try not to wonder what this says about me as a person. The truck behind me edges closer, and I resist the urge to slam on my brakes. At least once a week in my town, in spite of signs warning them against driving beneath it, a four-wheeler gets stuck under the overpass and has to be pried out, and today a man in Florida was arrested for trying to roll across the Atlantic in a giant hamster wheel. Sometimes I wonder about evolution and whether a species can regress. What would our ancestors think of us in these terrible, metal machines, together on this road every day, getting nowhere? Something always holds us up—if it’s not the weather, it’s an accident, and this highway always seems to need repairs. I turn my audiobook off and listen to the sound of my car wheels spinning against the broken road. A man in the Toyota next to me clutches his steering wheel. Staring ahead, he leans in, hard. We do our best to adapt. I have been patient, waiting for the lighter version of Rhonda to appear. I want her to know I’m rooting for her.
Joan Kwon Glass is the Korean American author of Night Swim, winner of the Diode Book Prize (Diode Editions, 2022) & two chapbooks. She serves as Poet Laureate for Milford, CT; editor-in-chief for Harbor Review; and as a writing instructor for several writing centers. Joan’s poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Poetry Daily, The Slowdown, Poetry Northwest, Cherry Tree Lit, Ninth Letter, Asian American Writer’s Workshop (The Margins), Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Texas Review and elsewhere. She lives in coastal Connecticut with her family.
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Truly a fantastic poem, Joan!