The Way Out Is Through by Jim Whiteside
The road uncurving through the field. I open
the app, the closest man (just the torso of a man—
some toned rancher?) is 38 miles away. I pass
slow-moving windmills turning wind into light
in some far-off city. I pass trucks carrying oil,
milk, a load of onions (mostly) covered by a tarp.
You’re hot, he says. We exchange pictures
of our erections. Messages from farther away:
Do you have a private place we can go? I pass
into Kansas, the road uncurving. A conveyor belt
moves corn into a silo. Slowly, a mechanical hand
waters a field. More pictures—he is very beautiful.
He invites me to stop. I will never see his face. I am
alone in the car. The emblem for the app is a mask.
Jim Whiteside is the author of a chapbook Writing Your Name on the Glass (Bull City Press, 2019) and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow. His poems appear in The New York Times, POETRY, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, and Boston Review. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Sewanee: The University of the South.
