These winding roads always recall
Thriller, which was playing
as we drove them
the winter we were twenty-two.
Michael Jackson was just three weeks dead then.
Still, no more alive than he is today.
Snow settled on signs marking
our route.

I wasn’t a big fan of MJ before he died.
I guess that’s always the way
we mourn a loss that isn’t ours,
we discover more than we remember.
His roots were in soul but
he’d become the biggest selling pop
artist in the world when he passed away
three weeks ahead of his comeback tour.

Tonight it’s a Kanye cover
of a Ray Charles classic, an improvement
on the aging original in my pragmatic opinion.
You sit beside me again, your life
in my hands where you left it all those years ago.
You flinch as a car coming in the opposite direction
overcorrects on a turn, crosses the centreline,
regains control.

I remember why I left this place
as darkness falls and the temperature drops
well below zero. It was the same reason you stayed.
It was always too damn hot back home,
you said. You hope there will be
snow again tonight, but for me
the romance is only in the memory
of it, melting on the roadside.

This piece first appeared in Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2019.