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Real America

Fiona Jin | Poetry, Fall 2025

after Richard Siken

You’re in the car with a beautiful girl, and she tells you

we’ll make it out together, late-night I-57 lights reflecting

off of shiny black hair. She expends words methodically,

like quarters into a Walmart claw machine, and you are both

eighteen again, eating instant ramen straight from the pan,

the apartment kitchen a zero-sum game as you sob I don’t know

if I can take it anymore. Outside the swaying goldenrods

dot asterisks into land miles away from anything

named. The GPS clicks indifferently. You are

the Office Depot razor fissuring orange exam booklets;

you are the undeveloped field bordered to be broken

into. You’re in the car with a beautiful girl, and you want

to tell her you love her, but trying to love anything feels

like fighting a war, and when she asks what you are afraid of, 

you’re back where blocky Midwestern suburbs unravel into prairies

so silent two syncopated breaths become one. She mouths futures

just beyond the infinite horizon line. You’ll take anything

to taste them; you cannot help this. Don’t worry, she grins,

and you’re seeing stars gleam in her eyes, puncturing highways into

the smoggy night sky. We’ll see America soon, baby. So soon.

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Fiona Jin is a writer from Ames, IA with roots in Beijing. Her writing has been published in Ghost City Press, GASHER Press, the Center for Fiction, the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, Eucalyptus Lit, and Sophon Lit, where K. Iver selected her calculus poem "Maclaurin Series" as the winner of its Poetry Contest.