Over there,
there are fields
of yellowed
grass, and trees,
all nondescript,
and a snow
mound shrinking,
though there
is no boy tussling
in the snow,
no leaves
stuck to his
thick wool cap
and mittens, no,
not in this
weather, no
mother looking
sternly on, no,
nothing like
that exactly,
just the field,
the inevitable
turning of leaves—
a sound
I can almost
feel even with
the window
raised, or so
I’d like to
believe, though
I can’t quite
feel it, not
the way I feel
your hand
touching
the bag
of dried mango
at the same
time as mine,
oh, the luck
of that, and
luck too that
no one has
struck a deer
for many miles
now, the bare
road, what isn’t
slumped there,
the same
kind of proof
as the needle,
bright and
trembling, just
above the E
on the fuel
gauge, which points
to a specific
emptiness, one
surely necessary
to address,
though I can see,
with increasing
clarity, all
that’s left
the frame,
everything already
in the past
tense, even us,
and simpler that
way, to somehow
ignore the cold,
and the cost
slowly climbing
at the pump
right before
the nozzle’s click,
or the soft light
of the phone,
and your face—
so briefly lit
and filling up
the window.

Nathan McClain is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017), a recipient of fellowships from Sewanee Writers' Conference, The Frost Place, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and a graduate of Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers. His poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Poem-a-Day, The Baffler, West Branch Wired, The Common, upstreet, and On the Seawall. He teaches at Hampshire College.

Josephine Hiett Joy was born near Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, in 1869 and soon thereafter her family moved to Peoria, Illinois. After an early marriage that ended in divorce, she went to Chicago and subsequently married Frank Joy. She became interested in painting after they moved to San Diego. A prolific worker, she became a WPA artist in the late 1930s, which led to her first solo exhibition at the Galerie St. Etienne in New York City in 1943. Joy died in Peoria in 1948.