Heidi Seaborn

Cross-Country Road Trip

If we had not driven
away from one sea into
the sunburn
if we had not heard
the news heard only
sawtooth static
if we had not pressed on
over the humpbacked
landscape across seared
flatlands & townships
if we had not hastened
past the unforgiving
flagging front porches 
not seen the fields
tilled & spent
if we had not kept
driving past the exits
endless offramps
had not fueled on fast
food & fear if we had
not raced past signs
blinking vacancy
careened past the roadkill
of our selves if
we had not zoomed
toward the turbulent
tides of another sea
had not left our shoes
on a dune
if we had not swum
out into the rip—
land distancing as if
discarding us
as if we had not once
taken the wheel
assuming we
could drive.

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Heidi Seaborn is the author of three books of poetry, tic tic tic, (September 2025), An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and three chapbooks, Bite Marks, Once a Diva and Finding My Way Home. She’s won numerous awards including The Missouri Review Editors Prize in Poetry and recent work appears in AGNI, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Financial Times, Image, Poetry Northwest, Terrain.org, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi’s Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and holds degrees from Stanford and NYU. heidiseabornpoet.com