The Honey Land Review
Spring 2009
Volume 1, Issue 2

    - the route numbers of the American Highway.  
    Our family poses in front of state signs: You are Now
    Entering Delaware, Watch for Chickens,
    Welcome to Indiana, $50 Fine for Snide Remarks About Corn.

    We don’t stop at Gila Monster World
    the Petrified Zoo, or picnic grounds
    where men smoke, buy grape drink for the kids,
    where wives shake out their pleats, visit "the facilities".  

    Instead, ¼ mile on right, we roll
    down every bumpy turn-off, roll down
    the windows to squint at every single marker
    commemorating the trees, trails or pot-holes

    that Made Our Country What She is Today.
    We climb State Libraries’ marble steps,
    where Dad looks up citations, visit
    power plants where we applaud short films

    on Redi-Kilowatt and his Atomic Army.
    From the Capitol Dome, an angel with a sword
    drives us back to the motel in gnat-muggy afternoon
    where I dive to the concrete dashes

    on the pool’s sloping bottom. Now I can be
    Mademoiselle X, unknown quantity
    without sign or name, the part
    of the equation not already solved.

The Algebra of My Summers
Roberta Feins
ROBERTA FEINS lives in Seattle, and works as a computer
consultant.  She received her MFA in Poetry from New England
College in 2007. Her poems have been published in Tea Party,
Floating Bridge Review, The Lyric and Antioch Review, and are
forthcoming in Five AM and Slant. She edits the e-zine Switched On
Gutenberg http://www.switched-ongutenberg.org
Photo By Melanie Faith