Where We Are Going, We Have Been Before

Poetry by ​Jen Hallaman 

Northeast Ohio Writer

after Where We’ve Been We’ve Been Before by Josh Chefitz

We coast down a road that bleeds black through this bleak land of January. 
An unheard heartbeat conveys us through two spidery arteries to the place 
where I promise you: your day will be great, I’ll be back at five. I love you. 
Cruise past the vast drained lake & I’m back on the tree lined drive where I was born, 
its suspended sea of green lost to the shape-shifting season, bare branches drooping 
with the weight of bygone color. This landscape skulks in my head like a first language: 
pinching at the unformed edges of my poems, overlaying the contours of every foreign city 
I’ve yearned to explore. I tried to nest amidst the East Coast’s neat grids, sinuous 
mountain highways, Atlanta’s scattered catalogue of Peachtrees. Here is what sticks 
with me, always. Here, we were strata. We were single-celled algae crackling 
with enough potential to become a bird’s egg splintering open, its down-coated skull 
emerging. We were sun-shaped and sun-colored, a thick peel sheltering sour fruit. A green 
stalk sprouting from silt. Earth’s first veiny petals unfurling into bloom. This deep 
into winter, everything is dead, or will be soon: the leaves, the light, the fawn I saw 
curling one wounded leg into her belly as she hobbled across a sheet of ice. When I 
drive you home, in your rear-facing car seat, your eyes are fixed out back, watching 
the place we came from grow smaller. Me, my gaze drifts up to the five o’clock moon, 
hanging right where I expect to find it. One day, you'll be this cold sky, and I'll be
a wisp of cloud bulging with lakewater-turned-snow. You’ll be a barn owl; I’ll be a berry. 
You’ll be a great blue whale. I’ll be pebbles of asphalt come loose from this road, 
decaying at the bottom of our ocean. 

Jen Hallaman

Jen Hallaman lives in Cleveland, Ohio with her husband, daughter, and two twenty-pound(!) cats. She works at a local independent bookstore, where she spends her lunch break writing poems. Her writing appears in the New Orleans Review, Pithead Chapel, DIAGRAM, and Orange Blossom Review, among many other publications. Find her at www.jenhallaman.com.