LEAVING HOME

Your new town has a river that sings the Ojibwe Strong Woman song, and one afternoon it led us

on a path along its burly banks until we decided to split off, and we soon got lost and you took out your phone to see where we were exactly, and you showed me that if we kept walking

we'd hit a street, one of many, lined with campus housing, and while we could get back

to the car by going through a beehive cluster of apartments where bare-chested boys threw frisbees and girlfriends leaned from windows, you said we should probably go back the way

we came, and I became suddenly aware that your new town had a beauty that my town,

which used to be your town, did not, so I told you to get in the car, and I drove to TJ Maxx

and Olive Garden, buying clothes and food in familiar places to prove I was wrong. I let you take me to your new special places, for coffee and omelettes, but I dismissed them secretly as franchises waiting to happen, and suddenly you turned to me and said, I don't know what this is. I can't go home. I am sad. I can't either, I said. Having taken the measure of one another, we decided to spend the rest of our time together at our summer beach a thousand miles away

and wade hand in hand, and hop in sync, as cold waves lined up to knock us down.

JK Miller is a former third grade dual language teacher. He lives on the edge of cornfields. He is the first place winner in the modern sonnet category of the 2025 Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest. His poetry has been recently published, or will be, in shoegaze literary, Midsummer Dream House, Harrow House, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Rat's Ass Review, 50-Word Stories, Verse-Virtual, Paratextos and Amethyst Review. In the summer of 2025 he completed a solo 1,335-mile bicycle ride from his house to his son's house to see his newborn grandson.