By Angie O’neal

It’s not hard for me to believe

in things I can’t see.

In whatever tells

the beargrass it’s time to bloom.

That snowpack on the mountain,

the source from which

a river rises. This valley, where meltwater

rivers made a way through

mountains long ago.

Father, who died an old man,

they say I shouldn’t

mourn your long life.

But I still look for you in places

you’ve been.

In headlights

bright as twin moons

lighting up a dark road.

A map smoothed flat

across the kitchen table. The neon

needle in your transistor radio

finding the right station.

In this world, you vanish—

new moon, cirrus cloud, the end

of a straight Montana road.

But I see you like the river

trusts the way forward, scrambling

through rock toward open waters.

The way I see a poem before I

find the right words.

How I know this valley is where

an ancient mountain

once stood.

Angie Crea O'Neal’s poems have appeared in The Christian Century, the Cumberland River Review, Sycamore Review, among others. Her first full-length collection, This Persistent Gravity, was published by Finishing Line Press earlier this year. She teaches English at Shorter University in Rome, Georgia, where she lives with her teen daughters and three rescue dogs.