-the horror and the bliss-

from the backseat, so young that my feet

couldn’t reach the floorboard, to the advanced age
when the floorboard had risen to nearly reach my feet,

a ride in the car evoked in me meandering questions
anticipating the journey's destination.

from the window, the same kinds of landscape passed by,

the same sort of people walked along the chain-linked fences.

If I was told where I was being taken,

it usually meant to a place of my liking,––

the amusement park in Westport,
a family outing at the pine-forested Reservation,
cousin Celia's house in Providence,

or Buttonwood Park Zoo in New Bedford to see the animals.

my favorite exhibit (beyond the vision of cousin Celia)
was that of the great American Plains Buffalo,
with its massive horned-head, black, vacant eyes,
and ever-present benign attitude of submission,–– locked-up,

innocent of wrongdoing,––  and like myself, forced to eat

whatever was put in front of him.

if they kept their mouths shut in the front seat,
a sense of foreboding would come over me;

some type of check-up, an extraction, an inoculation
to ward-off the communicable disease of one sort or another,

or a slow drive to Freetown and the kid in the pulsating iron lung...

everything and anything and all things great and small,

but always with a sense of dread were on the table from the backseat

when they didn’t tell me where I was going.

Quequechan