From the Book Of Borrowed Names -Jeannine Atkins

PICNIC-



As the locomotive speeds past sunflower fields and redbirds,Rose won't look back.She finds a future through the revolving glass doors of the Midland Hotel. Working all night,she taps her feet on the marble floor,stamps out and dashes, dots,
Sends messages across the country.Fingers flying, she telegraphs thirty messages an hour and earns $2.50 a week. She needs more in Kansas City, where good hat costs four dollars. For supper, she nibbles five cents' worth of peanuts, sucking off the salt to make them last, then takes on the day shift,too.

Charming, lonely salesmen ask her out for dinner or dancing. She says yes.
Mama writes, When are you coming home?
Not Yet, Rose answers at eighteen, nineteen, then twenty.

She can't go back with nothing to show but a few almost- out- of- fashion hats.

She meets a brown- eyed man with a glance quick as a match catching fire.
Over dinner, Gillette Lane talks about rivers he crossed and cities he's seen. Candlelight falls on the bones under his cheeks, which curve like question marks.
One Sunday he rents a horse and buggy. They ride through a park, discover a brook, spread a blanket in the shade. They eat hard bread, soft cheese, and apples. The small bones of Gillette's hands press his skin like roads on a map.
When they kiss, she smells wild mint, moss, and pine,
as old loneliness, grudges, imperfect face and body splash
away like water over rocks.

The next day they embrace as if at a long-awaited reunion. They devote weekends to each other, talking about music, moving pictures, motorcars. He brings a bouquet, says roses for Rose.
Lush loose petals fall. They walk to the edge of the woods where he asks,

Have you seen a Ocean?

This handsome man cares more for trains and traveling than houses. Rose hooks an ankle over that of the man who knows the song she loved as a child: Not here, not yet.>

Overhead, birds spread silvery- blue wings unclasping forgotten blue>> TBC