It is Spring and I am 17 by Courtney Hitson

And Brittany and I sit on the back of her white Corsica while Ashley drives it down Florida Street, first going 20, then 30, then 45 and we dig the caps of our fingers into the trunk’s crevices just enough to maybe still fall off the car as it accelerates past the brown sheaths of branches bracing with leafbuds, past the illuminated cornfields that buzz with waking fireflies revving inside the husks, past embers of dusk elongating into angles of light that burn scars into the farmscape and I swear I can feel the sky’s tingling blue when I throw my face upwards and see the jet’s dissolving cloud-paths encircle each other, the image framed by segmented power lines that liquefy into black, airborne rivers. I am overcome by spring’s scalded-yellow scent, how it inflates the evening shadows that lengthen like long balloons about to burst. Beneath our feet the road’s yellow dashes meld into a single cord that tethers me to everything, forges a circuitry between the zephyrs of experience that stream through me like photons through skin.

Courtney Hitson earned her MFA in poetry from Columbia College Chicago. Her poems have appeared in Foundling Review, Ilk, Arsenic Lobster, and are forthcoming in Wisconsin Review. Her scholarly interests include cognitive rhetorical theory, cognitive neuroscience, theoretical and particle physics, and pedagogical studies. Her non-scholarly interests include freestyle unicycling, anatomy, and compulsive doodling. She currently lives with her husband, Tom Nowak, and their pitbull and kittens in Evanston, Il.

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