Linda Lowe
Refill Day
People with their oxygen tanks lined up along the road. Signs said no gasping no sighing no wishing things were different. Let bygones be bygones, they’re gone, aren’t they? Stop the looking back, stop wondering what’s next. Don’t ask your neighbor, don’t call a friend. No pouting, no pleading. When the truck’s empty, it’s empty. It will slam its doors and roar to life honking. A sound that reminds you of that truck from summer, the one bearing ice cream, back when the air was spiffy and you breathed so deeply you could have dug all the way to China.
Linda Lowe is the author of the chapbook Karmic Negotiations (Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press, 2003), winner of the SPT National Poetry Competition. Her poems and stories have appeared in Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Outlook Springs, A Story in 100 Words, The New Verse News, Star 82 Review, and Crack the Spine, as well as in the anthology Weatherings (FutureCycle Press, 2015), edited by David Chorlton and Robert S. King. Lowe lives in Southern California with her husband.
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