Handed our memories, 
real as barbed wire fences.
            Sixty years ago,
we escaped out of Cherokee,
            to go marry, toward Enid.

            There will be more to living  
            than barbed wire
but we were not yet to know it.
We found Oklahoma in our eyes
            everything we know better now.

Time was slipping through our fingers.
            Tumbleweeds
            hounded us like police cars.
We didn’t know how they knew.
We were from our state.

We were just kids.
It seemed, we’d have no chance.
My sweetheart was not sixteen,
            the road was two-lane.
And of course, it was the license plates!

            Until at last,
there were a thread of ads
            “Burma Shave,
            I want to live.”
No one was going to tell us any different.

Paul Dickey has recently appeared in Plume, The Midwest Quarterly Review, Laurel Review, I-70 Review, Plainsongs, failbetter.com and Apple Valley Review. His recent book of poetry volume was released in September, 2022 in Anti-Realism in Shadows and Suppertime. He has also released in the past year a volume of flash fiction by What My Characters Should Have Said and a poetry chapbook A Reading of Dali (Likely Misunderstood) Which is Twenty Meters Becomes This Poet’s Self – portrait.