One August, my grandmother wears blue jeans
and thumbs a ride from the Caney Mountain foothills
fifty miles north to the crest of Cedar Gap
and the snaking Frisco line.
On as much steam as her own,
the locomotive crawls into old Las Vegas,
where she baptizes her legs
in the El Rancho swimming pool
just long enough to be snatched up
by a flashy suit.
By sundown, she wears the new life
of a showgirl who never returns home.
Gambler’s dotted die latches at temple and wrist.
The only black and white she’s known before—
local newsprint yielding stories
of falling hog prices,
bumper crops of peaches.
—Dave Malone, from O: Love Poems from the Ozarks, T. S. Poetry Press