Iowa Writes
DEBRA MARQUART Riding Shotgun through Iowa with Quest
this musician's life. play until one, pack up, get paid. send the dancers home drunk, sweaty clinging to each other. on the long way home I ride shotgun with Quest helping keep watch over the night. our talk turns to women and death, what Quest calls all things inevitable. he is not so afraid of the final embrace as the moment before, the arms stretched out to us, the looking into the eyes of it. in the dead of this night, we agree to trust it, the good faith of this road running beneath us. I tell him how this place is like my home, where every night vapor lights burn in yards, and every morning farmers rise at dawn to milk the cows. not for me that life. in a family of settlers, I was the immigrant.
this musician's life. play until one, pack up, get paid. send the dancers home drunk, sweaty clinging to each other. on the long way home I ride shotgun with Quest helping keep watch over the night. our talk turns to women and death, what Quest calls all things inevitable. he is not so afraid of the final embrace as the moment before, the arms stretched out to us, the looking into the eyes of it. in the dead of this night, we agree to trust it, the good faith of this road running beneath us. I tell him how this place is like my home, where every night vapor lights burn in yards, and every morning farmers rise at dawn to milk the cows. not for me that life. in a family of settlers, I was the immigrant. fixing my eye on the horizon setting myself to reel madly across this continent. flying through Iowa, past cornfields and silos, the two-storied houses our dancers have gone to sleep in, I doze, wake, doze, to find Quest, hands on the wheel trying to outdistance the road. five a.m. passing a farmyard I see my father out to do the morning chores. his shadow, bending to pet the dog becomes my brother. this is the time of accidents, the ones we'll never see. we pass through knowing that soon the sun will show its awful face, that soon even our headlights will be worthless.
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About Iowa Writes
Since 2006, Iowa Writes has featured the work of Iowa-identified writers (whether they have Iowa roots or live here now) and work published by Iowa journals and publishers on The Daily Palette. Iowa Writes features poetry, fiction, or nonfiction twice a week on the Palette.
In November of 2008, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designated Iowa City, Iowa, the world's third City of Literature, making the community part of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network.
Iowa City has joined Edinburgh, Scotland and Melbourne, Australia as UNESCO Cities of Literature.
Find out more about submitting by contacting iowa-writes@uiowa.edu
DEBRA MARQUART Debra Marquart is a professor of English at Iowa State University. Her work has appeared in numerous journals. "Riding Shotgun through Iowa with Quest" first appeared in her collection Everything's a Verb (New Rivers Press, 1995) and was reprinted in Voices on the Landscape: Contemporary Iowa Poets, edited by Michael Carey (Loess Hills Books, 1996). |
This page was first displayed on December 06, 2007
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