Highways and Byways: Murder Creek

By Maik Strosahl

After you get your CDL, you find out you really don’t know very much about driving a semi. Most companies that hire drivers who have just acquired their license require them to spend a certain amount of time being trained by an experienced driver. I started my own such training in May of 2018.
    And while driving together for many hours, a driver and his trainer cannot help but exchange life stories. So, it was on a load passing through Alabama that I heard the story of how my trainer got saved.
    As a writer, I listened, but I was also letting my mind wander through the wilderness along I-65. We crossed a short bridge over what a sign said was Murder Creek. I could not help but think what an ironic place that would be for someone to seek forgiveness, get saved, and want to be baptized.
    I wrote on a napkin an almost complete poem, then lost it in the transition to my own truck, exactly three years ago today. I was able to recreate the poem, which was published on Project Agent Orange. A week after it appeared there, the tissue poem magically re-appeared.
    I liked parts of both the original poem and my recreation, and I decided to redo the poem with what I thought were the best elements of each. That version appeared in the second issue of the print magazine Last Stanza Journal.
    I haven’t passed over Murder Creek since, but fondly remember the journey that continued down through Alabama and on around the Gulf into Louisiana.

Murder Creek

I left her behind at Murder Creek,
buried my transgressions
in the warm Alabama mud,
wringing hands in the waters
to wash the blood away,
then walked back to the highway,
sunshine guiding me through the trees,
a great weight now lifted.

I prayed,
first time in forever,
prayed—
not for forgiveness,
but just to be heard,
a brackish soul passing through
these swamplands and Pascagoula
to be baptized into the bay,

my salts to the sea,
sea salts back to me.

Copyright © 2021 by Maik Strosahl Michael E. Strosahl has focused on poetry for over twenty years, during which time he served a term as President of the Poetry Society of Indiana. He relocated to Jefferson City, Missouri, in 2018 and currently co-hosts a writers group there.