FREE VERSE Poem: The Miles Between Us, by Nandana Sukumar

I ran miles away from home,
gave my shoes away to the homeless
till nothing remained to give
but when I finally returned home
a single candle burned
over my mother’s empty birthday card

The convoluted flood
of screams in my mind
rose
So I replaced it with emptier thoughts,
and pictured the smiles of family strangers

My house behind me
dilated into a microscopic spec
as my feet thumped away
on the sludgy mud path
one mile
two miles
three miles

The GPS read “two hours, 100 miles”
yet my steering wheel kept turning
for 482 miles,
and fifteen hours,
to escape the flood

My surroundings transformed
from floods to pavements
rain to sugarcoated sunlight
maybe I drove too far away
this time

I missed the chaos
so I finally scribbled “I love you”
on my mother’s birthday card
but she had drowned in my flood of thoughts
many miles ago

I grew tired
of steering the wheel
away from the flood
so I drove back,
dipped my feet in the
groggy ice water,
and
sank
in my
screams