Road Trip with Anne Brontë
Declivities, she says, and luster of August. Everything becomes scenery when one must paint. A blessed single life is declared, but the narrative is decidedly nonlinear; there is refusing and there is wanting. I think of Wildfell as a truck stop—someplace you can see from a great distance but don’t always want to reach. Sunshiney road, she says, to counteract brooding. I too am trying to deviate from the usual ambitions. The dog introduces us to other people’s children and tantrums; as devices go, the GPS is misleading and the diary constrains agitation. In my head, I am not so helpless—I am making lists. Sometimes she hears advice. Sometimes the arguing goes on so long I forget the party is over and the protagonist cornered in an armchair; also, it takes my brain a long time to stop driving while I swim circles in the tiny hotel pool like a neurotic goldfish. Meanwhile, she gathers bluebells or uses dead birds to mark the passing seasons.
Ceridwen Hall is a PhD candidate at the University of Utah and lives in Salt Lake City. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, and other journals.
Cover Photo by Amanda De Vito (Flickr)
NEW SOUTH 
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