Write Together 2026 is now open for registration! Come write with us for an hour each morning, January 12-17. Each day’s Zoom session features different readings, different prompts, and the chance to write quietly together in solidarity and appreciation. Click here for more information and to sign up. 

Remember playing Hot Lava? Making blanket forts? Drawing sinks and burners on big empty cardboard boxes and playing House? Running through the cornfield playing Tag and Hide & Seek? Turning the old broken-down chicken coop into a tiny house with table and chairs and curtains? Playing Restaurant and making menus and taking orders from your friend’s ever-patient grandfather? Okay, maybe a few of these are Alison-specific, but I know you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Rolls-Royce Dreams, by Ginger Andrews

Using salal leaves for money,
my youngest sister and I
paid an older sister
to taxi an abandoned car
in our backyard. Our sister
knew how to shift gears,
turn smoothly with a hand signal,
and make perfect screeching stop sounds.

We drove to the beach,
to the market, to Sunday School,
past our would-be boyfriends’ houses,
to any town, anywhere.
We shopped for expensive clothes everywhere.
Our sister would open our doors
and say, Meter’s runnin’ ladies,
but take your time.

We rode all over in that ugly green Hudson
with its broken front windshield, springs poking
through its back seat, blackberry vines growing
through rusted floorboards;
with no wheels, no tires, taillights busted,
headlights missing, and gas gauge on empty.​ 

Click here for more information about poet Ginger Andrews. Today’s poem can be found in An Honest Answer, published in 2021 by Story Line Press. 
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