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It’s Your Car; I Am Still a Passenger
A Golden Shovel of “Dreams” by Langston Hughes
Traci McMickle



I lost hold 
like an uncoupled train, so fast.
You used to 
ask things in my dreams.
I don’t remember what for.
There’s no one left to ask if
I was ever in your dreams.
 
Your plants were the last things to die.
I’d given away the rest of your life, 
though the wreck of your car is 
sitting in the corral, a 
broken-winged 
pile of metal that used to be a T-Bird.
 
Tomorrow, next week, next year, I’ll scrap that 
damn thing, but for now I cannot 
imagine anyone else making it fly.
Some days I sit and hold 
the keys, feel wind fast 
in my hair on the way back to–
 
but what good are these dreams?
Mom says it’s not right for 
a woman to sit empty when 
she ought to get some dreams 
of her own. Go
get yourself a life,
 
she said. Shelly’s girl is
single. I write her number on a 
yellow Post-it. My smile is barren. 
Out in the back field
I stick it to the dash. If I come unfrozen, 
maybe I’ll call. I play with 
the shifter. The air tastes like snow.
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