The Passenger

Kathryn Jones

May 21, 2023

He rides, looking out the window

at everything, at nothing. 

He rides because he cannot drive and

he hates it, hates me for driving him.

He longs to be in control 

of something, anything,

but the world spins on without him,

as if to say, “We can go on without you just fine.”

He cannot remember what happened yesterday

or the day before, but he remembers 

what it felt like to put the key in the ignition and 

drive, free, toward the horizon.

He is the passenger now, not free, 

not looking at the horizon because there is none, 

riding into the dark, dark night 

even though it’s a brilliant sunny day.

Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas. Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.