Poetry By Christine Poythress

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Big Blue

As dusk rolls in, my mind wanders back to 1969, riding around in my 1952 school bus headed to the beach in February with my roommates, S and Big C, and their boyfriends to skinny dip in the Atlantic Ocean, and how S’s boyfriend, D, said the sparkles in the waves were phosphorus, and how I called him a smarty pants because I preferred to think of it as fairy dust. And the time Big C and I took a road trip to visit my boyfriend at the Federal Correctional Institute in Tallahassee—he was there because he’d been caught with twenty-five pounds of marijuana, not exactly personal use—and driving there in Big Blue—my hippie ride, my blue school bus with screened-in windows, a kitchen, a room with bunks, and a toilet in the back—and while riding on the interstate, how some Canadian tourists filmed us as they passed by, me hanging out the kitchen window yelling Hi y’all. And how on Sunday afternoon, as we were leaving Tallahassee, Big Blue stalled in front of a service station, and lucky me, the owner was there. She needed lots of work, but I was broke. Saying he liked to camp with his family, the owner offered to trade his VW camper for my bus. Arriving home with a different ride, Daddy just shook his head. He must’ve thought I was a wee bit crazy, like his sister. A year later, I moved to L. A., leaving behind memories of Big Blue and the VW camper, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt that free again. Sometimes, I call S, and we talk about being nineteen and alive during the Free Love Era, and how she married, but I embraced wildness while she kept a candle for me. Yeah, we were there, but I never got a photo of Big Blue.

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Christine Poythress, a Georgia native, moved to California in 1970, then spent five years in New York City, hoping to be an opera star. Ditching that dream, the South drew her home, to Georgia and then Tennessee, where she sang everything from Puccini to Hank Williams. Masquerading as Ashley Austin, she secretly wrote poetry. Coming out of the poetry closet in 2014, she has written a memoir (still homeless), essays, and poetry.
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Her debut chapbook, Dharma’s Dance, was released by Finishing Line Press in 2025. Her poems have appeared in Synchronized Chaos and Quillkeepers Press. “My Tour of Honky Tonk Heaven Began on Highway 17,” will appear this fall in the James Dickey Review. ​