Joyce Sutphen




On the Way to the Farm I Think of My Sister

There’s a different highway now
coming across different fields
west of the old double lane.

Once you’re on it, you don’t have to stop
for anything, except congestion in July
when everyone else is heading

North. You’d like it: driving at 80 mph
with the music forty years past when
you left the planet…but no more

gasoline at 29 cents a gallon! no more
Beatles (John and George—both dead),

no more cows in the stanchions, no more hay
in the barn. Otherwise, everything is
pretty much the way you remember it.