PROSE POETRY
LUCINDA TREW
RUST
My hair, he said, was the color of rust on the rims of his car. Not auburn or chestnut, strawberry blonde, but rust – a coppery veil falling over my shoulders or shrouding whitewall tires on a worn-out Ford flecked with veins of corrosion, playing southern rock cassettes. Things kept long enough become lacey with decay, iron oxide maps of where we’ve been. I liked that he thought of us in his car and the rides we took with the windows rolled down, wind disassembling my hair, the roar of road beneath, loud enough to make us unafraid to sing and go farther and faster than we should in a car washed and waxed for weekend nights like this when everything is brilliant and bright and the miles fly by and my hair trails behind and he sighs.
Lucinda Trew lives and writes in Union County, N.C. Her work has appeared in The Fredricksburg Literary and Art Review, The Bangor Literary Journal, San Pedro River Review, Flying South and other journals. She is a recipient of a 2020 Kakalak Poetry Award, a 2019 North Carolina Poetry Society Award, and was named a 2020 North Carolina Poetry Society poet laureate award finalist.