The closer we get to your father’s house,
the emptier the land around us gets.
Here, I feel like we could drive forever.
Here, Texas has no end.
Asleep in the backseat booster,
you dream of something I can’t see.
I bet it’s big. I bet it makes the pumpjacks kneel,
excites the earth until it inks the land.
I bet it grows and grows and grows,
fills the horizontal nothingness,
turns tanker trucks into Tonka toys.
Jonathan Fletcher holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he won Northwestern University Press’s Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize contest in 2023, for which he will have his debut chapbook, This is My Body, published in 2025.