After intervals of highway, you climb out of the stiff chasm of unconsciousness to more highway. Twin yellow lines stretch out in front of you like the afterimages of starships. Everything is velocity. Everything is hyperspace. Oblivion is a place not far from where you start out, not far from scrub pines and red grain silos. Take a few wrong turns in one-stoplight towns, make a few wrong choices at the beginnings of romantic misadventures, and you will find yourself, mallet in hand, hammering at the joists of a foundation, the foundation of a mansion, a mansion where no one can live. Outside are a thousand feral cats. A few fishbones. Everyone you have ever loved turns out to be a non-player character. You control nothing at all.
Ross White is the director of Bull City Press, an independent publisher of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He is the author of Charm Offensive, winner of the Sexton Prize for Poetry, and three chapbooks: How We Came Upon the Colony, The Polite Society, and Valley of Want. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, POETRY, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, and The Southern Review, among others. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and eats an average of 1.3 chickpea salads each day.
