Highway Poems

By Ryanne Kap

​Exit 295 - Guelph
Highway 401
2019, E.H.
 
We’re hurtling down the highway in delicate silence. I talk about the weather. I’m not good at small talk because I would rather set something on fire than turn the lights on. He’s comfortable with the quiet. The best way to make me love you is to tell me you love someone else. Her name is Megan. The same car passes us three times. I’m looking at him more than the speedometer. If he loved me it would be quietly. It would feel like being home, doing laps around the subdivisions, gunning through yellow lights. We would walk those worn-out cul-de-sacs and count the stars. We would be an old married couple at twenty-one. There would be no sensation. The car passes us a fourth time. When he tells me her name I erase our romance. I ask him if he likes the temperature this time of year.

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​Canada Customs - Blue Water Bridge
Start of Highway 402
2022, D.N.
 
In 1973, the Ontario government built a water plant near the Bluewater Bridge. The plant has a circular observation deck. It overlooks the place where Lake Huron meets the St. Clair River. In the middle of the deck is a raised dais. If you stand on the dais and speak, some trick of the architecture returns your voice to you. No one knows why the deck was built; it wasn’t in the original plans. No one knows why it echoes. It could be the curved walls, or the giant underwater reservoir underneath the hill. You take me here on our first official date. You tell me to stand on the dais. I look at you. I juggle options: something funny? Profound? Should I tell you that I am weak and that I have wanted you for so long? I make a fart sound with my mouth. I let out a tiny ahhh. In the echo, I hope you hear everything else.

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​Exit 48 - Shaganappi Trail
Highway 201S
2025, A.A.
 
“Right now we’re in a memory,” I say. I’m driving back from Edmonton, from the elk and the bison we saw with my family. “I don’t think that’s how that works,” you say. You charmed them all day. My aunt said you’re a keeper and I agree. “We only exist as these versions of ourselves but they’ll be gone soon,” I say. “This is the only way I can conceptualize being dead.” I have been wrong before. I have been unsure before. I am not unsure now. “Everything we do is in the present,” you say. We can’t already be our past selves. But we are because here I am writing this down the next day, remembering the way the sun set in your window. The moment passes but you’re still here next to me the way I remember it twenty thirty years from now, the way I love you yesterday tomorrow and today.

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Ryanne Kap is a Chinese Canadian writer from Strathroy, Ontario. Their most recent chapbook, failed (after)lives (The Blasted Tree, 2024), was shortlisted for the 2025 bpNichol Chapbook Award. Their work has appeared in Augur, Grain, Canthius, carte blanche, CV2, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Ryanne is a PhD candidate in English and creative writing at the University of Calgary and the Editor-in-Chief of The Ex-Puritan. You can find them online at ryannekap.com and X/Instagram @ryannekap.