LatinosUSA

I don’t want to go to Bar Harbor,
I’d rather be in New Boston with you.
I don’t want to go to Scottsdale,
I’d rather be in New Boston with you.

I’d rather be in New Boston
sitting across a table from you,
in a truck stop cafe, shaft of light
shining through plate glass.

I close my eyes, open them, and say,
“Earl, we’re in Texas. We’re in heaven,
we’ve crossed the Arkansas line.
These menus we’re holding are maps

to the afterlife: you know all, I know
nothing.” Only there’s no gray
in your blond hair and you are famished,
a ghost in rumpled chinos, ashes

at a curb, a rose on a stem
in an ether of mist, eager to get back
to Arkansas, eager to get back to
the Florida you were eager to leave,

or reluctant; since I wasn’t there,
I know only my regret:
my father said, “A friend called,”
I never returned that call.

Could I have done something then
so you’d be other than a memory
across a table? Other than ashes
in a snowbank viewed from a train?

I imagine you behind door number six
in your chapbook Paradise Motel,
in rumpled chinos, on the table
Marlboros and the draft of a poem

that will find its way into Poetry,
as yours found their way
shortly after our morning meander
across a state line. A mirror

behind a counter, sun shining
through plate glass, the server
at our table, with pencil and pad,
asking, “What will it be?”

Copyright © 2025 Pete Mladinic
All Rights Reserved

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Peter Mladinic earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas in 1985. Professor emeritus at New Mexico Junior College, he was a member of the English faculty for 30 years. His fifth book of poems, Voices from the Past, is was published by Better Than Starbucks Publications. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.