Know we’re entering the last leg when I see the three white glowing crosses up there on the hill. Wrong side of Connecticut and I’m reading everything like an omen. There’s an abandoned biblical theme park up there, I say. I wonder if its current emptiness makes it more accurate. My father is in the driver’s seat, my father who once drove this same route straight through the night because my brother had a fever so bad he ended up in the hospital, my father who shoulders his love for us like one of those big, glowing crosses. The road is so dark we might as well be underwater, street-lamps like the transparent eyes of some deep sea creature. There is a sinkhole between us my words keep falling into. I learn it like a magic trick, how to speak and interpret the silence as if it’s an answer, combing through signs and breaks in the weather. A flash of irritation across his thunderous brow and I am left staring up at the sky, looking for the shift in the air I missed. We drive until the crosses slip past us, until they become nothing but receding echoes in the rearview mirror and then vanish completely.
I wrote this poem as part of my master’s dissertation in the summer of 2023. It’s inspired by the specific experience of driving in America: how you often cover great distances all at once, even pushing past exhaustion, and are simultaneously inundated with religious imagery. There’s a connection presented between the emptiness of this Biblical theme park, a space once used for worship, and the silence between the speaker and their father. Speaking and not receiving a response can sometimes feel like praying — you’re left to make meaning where you can. Sometimes silence is an answer in itself, but it doesn’t necessarily equate to emptiness. The liminal setting of this poem, the feeling of being underwater, stretches this brief, seconds-long interaction and makes it feel so much heaver and longer. Then, the moment passes, and the drive continues. No way to go but forward.
Oona MacKinnon-Hoban was born and raised in Portland, Maine. She recently graduated from The University of Edinburgh, where she received a master’s degree in Creative Writing with distinction. She was a finalist for the Palette Poetry 2023 Rising Poet award and her work has previously been published in The Rising Phoenix Review and From Arthur’s Seat.
