Six Poems: Jo Blair Cipriano
Winner: Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry Selected by Simone Muench
drive When the roof of the car rolls back, a sound like boulders coming undone, the sun affirms there’s no returning: this older girl driving me home is a secret I’ll never know how to tell. Gold flecks her bronzed skin. Her hair tangles the wind and not the other way around. I am ten and old enough to know she is old enough to borrow heaven, hours at a time, in a roofless machine and we are alone together for the first time. “Want some?” She tips the cup, its styrofoam mouth stained the same slushie-red as hers. I lean in, the straw a flailing bridge between us, bump my chin then bottom lip on its plastic, sip too fast. She doesn’t notice. I turned nine while she was working in the shop with my dad. Two older boys with guitars walked in and moved as if pulled, as if the frozen waves of cream