Poetry by Belle Gearhart

​aslam karachiwala CC



Uncle Ernie 

And maybe I do cry when I see big rigs
on the side of the road in the middle of 
the night, their long bodies glowing in 
the flashes of headlights. I think about
the driver inside, snoring in the back, 
and I think about how I have always 
fallen asleep to the sound of cars
outside my window. And when I am 
driving to San Francisco one fall in
the middle of the night, up the Grape-
vine, and there are big rigs on one side
of me, I think of him, and how we have 
both driven so far and for so long in the 
open palm of the night just to get to the 
someone we loved. And my grandmother
tells me he talked about how we played 
basketball in the apartment complex that
one December and how it made him smile, 
how I was his “little buddy” and in reality
I was a small duckling following along after
him, because I couldn’t believe someone 
would be interested in me, who was eleven
and completely uninteresting to everyone. 
And again, that December, he walked around
my parent’s townhouse with a rag in the back
pocket of his weathered jeans, scooping up 
crumbs and wiping down walls, and he drank
a whole bottle of wine and stayed up all night 
and on Christmas Eve he slept downstairs on
the couch, and I thought he was Santa Claus. 
And my mother gave him a ceramic Nascar cup
stuffed with packets of hot chocolate mix the next
morning and he held it like someone had gifted 
him an expensive bottle of liquor, and I loved 
that about him, too. And then there was that 
sleepy time between Christmas and New Year’s
and we stood outside and I sat on the hood of my
dad’s car and he stood a few feet away smoking
a cigarette and maybe that memory is why I started
smoking as soon as I turned eighteen. But anyway,
the sky was a speckled egg, smooth and curved and
dotted, and we both looked up at it, and I couldn’t 
help but wonder if he was thinking of his kids, 
thinking that maybe they were looking at the
same sky, too. And that is such a cliche, but
what isn’t a cliche when you are eleven and still
haven’t fit into the right genre yet? But that’s why
I loved him, maybe, this skinny, alcoholic
Midwestern man, this uncle of mine. He surpa-
ssed genre, made me realize men could be kind. 
And when he died I gathered my father to my side,
when he told me in my mother’s kitchen, and all I 
could think was of that basketball court, him telling
me: shoot, kid.  And I shot. And that night, after 
I learned that he had died, I found the obituary 
online and his face looked unfamiliar, took up the 
whole square of the image. But it had been over
fifteen years since I’d last seen him. So yeah,
maybe I still cry when I see big rigs pulled over
on the side of the road, hoods popped open, 
the driver smoking a cigarette in despair, like
maybe that could have been him, waiting for
someone to come and rescue him from his 
own undoing. 

​

​
Belle Gearhart is an upcoming writer with forthcoming work in Longleaf Review, Capsule Stories, and Flash Frog Lit. They are a displaced New Yorker living in Southern California with their partner, child, and many cats.