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If you’ve ever driven down a country road in that eerie hour before the hazy paleness of sunlight first appears on the horizon, you know the sometimes melancholy, sometimes otherworldly feeling that washes over you. Intangible though it may be, Charlotte poet Ava Rohrbaugh, featured this week, attempts to capture their own reflective experience slipping through a rural ghost town one morning while the world still sleeps.
5:30 a.m.
By Ava Rohrbaugh, 15, of Charlotte
5:30 a.m.
No one is here,
only my dad and I
in the truck.
Ice like veins on the windshield.
A frozen vignette in the morning.
The houses lie dead beside the road.
Pity.
This early, nothing breathes.
As we drive past,
the building windows glare
like camera flashes,
tearless eyes in their wooden lids
watching us pass.
The mailboxes come quick
and leave faster.
Maybe they only exist when the headlights
find them.
Maybe we are passing through a never-ending
onion of layers of dark,
filled with listless houses and strange mailboxes,
wordless in the 5:30 a.m. dim.
The yellow line we climb is the only
color at 5:30 a.m.
The two of them seem out of place
on the asphalt.
Two can be lonely at 5:30 a.m.,
but all those in the dark seem too tired to feel.
The truck hacks and coughs beneath
the cruel pedal,
a meatless mule it becomes in the morning cold.
And the world passes in a forgetful smudge.
And the driveways grab at our tires.
And the mailboxes barely skim my passenger door,
frighteningly close.
And the world disappears again in the rearview window.
And we pass,
the only light in this sleeping world.
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