Am I Haunting Your Drive Down Highway 101 With Your New Man?

Can you feel me in the silence, can you smell me in the air?

The salt wind carries my scent to you and I hope it turns your stomach,

hope it makes you lose your appetite. Can you taste 

me in the salt on his lips, or in the

deep fried crunch of the cod?

You can stain my memory as much as you

Desire, but you will never 

be able to erase me. 

Did you stop before you got to Florence on purpose? Uncomfortable 

seeing remnants of our love like ruins 

of some ancient civilization resting lazily against the setting sun? Did it hurt, 

did you have to skip a few songs, Of Monsters and Men perhaps? 

Did it feel the same, or did it feel better--

driving along Highway 101 with my replacement? 

Don't smile out the window like that I can't take it, don't 

turn up the radio when Vide Noir comes on he won't even appreciate it. 

Did you stare out at haystack rock remembering 

all the times we walked along the sand? 

I swam and you watched 

from the shore. 

It was always too cold for you to join me.

Do u miss the way we moved together, 

the way we were? 

Finishing each other's 

sentences and laughing until our stomachs ached. 

Do you remember my birthday trip to the cabin? 

How we held each other, the gift 

and the reverence. 

When we did molly for the first time at that hotel just outside of Florence, 

and the sky was so pink I thought the world was ending. 

Did you stop in Manzanita because going further felt too much like coming home? 

Or was it just getting late, and you knew it was time to turn back?

 Did you think about Humbug, 

about the trips that will never be, like someone's dead 

uncle's ashes in an urn, sitting up on a mantle collecting dust?

You never liked my metaphors, but here's my last one: 

We are seeds in a child's pocket they forgot to plant.

Highway 101 art, we did not make this

Abigail Ray

is a writer from Portland, Oregon, and has been published in Same Faces Collective, Maudlin House, and Call Me Brackets, among others. She recently graduated with her Bachelor’s in English and writing from Portland State University. She primarily writes poetry, lyrical essays, and experimental fiction about loser-core women that are definitely not poorly disguised projections of herself, no matter what people are saying.