Day Ten Theme: Road Trips

 THE GRAVEYARD OF ABANDONED SHOES

We stopped for an unauthorized piss

at the side of the road in central Mexico

in our Pinto hatchback, the kind

of car that explodes when you rear-end it.

We had stayed well ahead

of the other cars, but it still seemed

that we weren't moving fast enough

to conceal the fact we had stolen our license plates

from an abandoned pick-up truck in Iowa City.

Any cop running the numbers

would see that we weren't a Chevrolet Silverado,

and we'd be pissing in the corner of a cell for sure,

but we weren't in the US any more.

We were in a Mexican field surrounded

by all manner of shoes,

plastic sandals in women's and children's sizes

crude muddy hiking boots, hastily discarded,

stiletto heels by the dozens,

tennis shoes with holes in them.

Someone had thrown a pair of shoes into a tree,

just as folks like to do in the states,

they swung in the breeze like a merry corpse.

Word had somehow traveled

that this was the ultimate destination

for the release of unwanted footwear,

perhaps with a glossy catalog advertising its charms.

We completed our own release, got back into the car,

pulled onto the dusty road,

and watched the shoe graveyard recede

in the rear view mirror,

hoping that nobody had seen us.