Poetry by Jennifer Campbell
Each driveway is a scuffed shoe,
tick marks revealing the extent
of our waiting.
Days when blue sky pokes through
the gray, cars fill the roads
with more color.
The gray days are what I want
to tell you about:
landscape, water, and horizon,
different smears of charcoal.
I hope this letter finds you well
is something I could say
if I were being impersonal,
but formality went out the window
with your last address.
We may freely speak
about the steak you fixed
to perfection or how it felt
to play pool after all this time,
experiences that are so real.
Yet someone who intercepts
this letter could imagine
I am speaking of the afterlife,
the imagery of travel a tool
to express how we keep moving.
Jennifer Campbell is a writing professor in Buffalo, NY, and a co-editor of Earth’s Daughters. She has two poetry collections, Supposed to Love and Driving Straight Through, and a chapbook of reconstituted fairytale poems. Jennifer’s work has recently appeared in Healing Muse and Paterson Literary Review and is forthcoming in Slipstream.
