☀ Today's Poem: "On the Road" Megan Kim

Wherever we go we look carefully.

Range of Light, Muir called the Sierra Nevadas.

And in the last hours of sun, we can see it:

the lored Gold Mountain, luring

Chinese men like M’s ancestors

with the promise of Californian wealth.

Our own faces, gilded for a breath.

Then it blinks out, as all illusions do

when conditions cease to be right.

We were most American

in movement, most in range

of that golden glow when

passing through. All I can say

is I love these small white churches

barely visible across the long fields.

I roll down the car window

to angle my voice against

mountainsides as M and I turn hairpins

to toss our small mixed

bodies into May-cold rivers:

the American River, the Smith River,

whatever streams of snowmelt

we can suffer. Once, our parents

were verbs in the mouths of siren

cities, gateways to their parents’

dreams: San Francisco, Los Angeles,

Seattle, songs strung too quickly into codas.

Now the persistent pull

to put them in our rearviews,

this rugged-dust, gas-station-cigarette,

hand-me-down nation

fitted like a crumpled fortune

into our ungovernable forms.