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• The Lights on Rt. 10
• Highway left behind, along the town’s rutted arm.
• Off ahead lights are piled, like painted covers of Long Island.
• Lens-flared traffic, hiking the rain home.

• I stand out in the night, and I see these chords lit up
• whenever I turn around. Blurring and fuzzing
• into a singular amoeba: one gentler conversation drawn across
• each of the few warm months. I still catch fire within that borderless middle
• of the spectrum. Like the trunk of a Christmas tree, we peered between
• glowing sprigs into the ornamented fragrance
• of my family’s living room: celebration witnessed celebration.

• Now just a looking-back: frost in April’s eye.

• Highway left behind. Lights stacked ahead.
• I sip it as I drive on, and in traveling it shifts from ahead
• to gone in the twitch of a kiss that never came.
• My hand is my own, but was never blind to Christmas,
• or color, or dawn.

Julia Wehner

Julia Wehner has been writing poems since her first poetry unit in the third grade (the birthplace of such works as “If Only I Could Marry Food”). Her largest dreams for the future include composing piano music, educating her future children in the art of noticing, and cooking every meal with home-grown fresh herbs. She hopes to tell honest stories through everything she writes, innovating commonly-felt human emotions in an attempt to catch readers off guard: to remind them how richly good it is to feel and to live.