Transitory Space, Nova Scotia, Canada, #379 Blue — Leah Oates

THE ROADTRIP BEGAN WITH A MONUMENTAL ACT OF DESTRUCTION

— Adriana Rewald

Overnight a spider had strung its web

between the curb bush and my passenger

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mirror. I saw how it caught cloudbreak,

stalled it, let it loose in sequins as I rounded

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the hood, shifting angles smoothly, my arms

full of baggage. To drive away now would be

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to stretch those strands to snapping. The sun

rose fast and the spider was light on my mind.

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When I started the car I thought briefly about

getting out, using a stick to conduct a gentle

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detachment, ensure I didn’t accidentally abscond

to Michigan with a Virginian arachnid hitched

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to my fender. But a good song came on

and my GPS zeroed in so I pulled out, casually

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ripping silk to follow a snaky blue trail across

four states. Sun hit all my windows roundly,

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I bought fast food and surfed radio swatches

of Midwest Jesus country, no thought lent

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to the small Southern spider whose homespun

efforts were long blown into the past, the small

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possibility that it now hid in the rain-sluice cracks

of my car door, holding on for dear future.

Adriana Rewald is a writer, translator, and teacher currently based in Roanoke, VA. She received her MFA in creative writing from Hollins University where she also received a Teaching Fellowship. She has lived and worked in Poland, South Korea, and Serbia. Her poetry has been published in Artemis and on poets.org, and she is the winner of the 2018 and 2019 Gertrude Claytor Poetry Prizes of the Academy of American Poets.

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Leah Oates has a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and a MFA from The School of the Art Institute. Oates has had solo shows at Susan Eley Fine Art, The MTA Lightbox Project at 42nd Street, The Arsenal Gallery in Central Park, The Center for Book Arts, Henry Street Settlement, and A Taste of Art Gallery and locally at Tomasulo Gallery in New Jersey, Real Art Ways in Connecticut, Sara Nightingale Gallery in Water Mill, Long Island, and the Sol Mednick Gallery at at the Philadelphia University of the Arts. Oates has had solo shows nationally at Anchor Graphics, Artemisia Gallery and Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, and internationally at Galerie Joella in Turku, Finland.

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