Rainbow Coat

By Caitlin Cowan

The best kind of clouds

are the color of car wash foam.

Friday nights I pay 

to see a rainbow, to recline 

my seat and soak myself

in the soft neon of the tunnel.

I screamed as a child,

made my grandmother promise

never again as the terry cloth arms

mollusced the car. It was 1989—

The Little Mermaid on my mind,

the car black as Ursula’s belly,

unknowable as the future’s beady

aperture. It would be my first, the car—

an ’85 Monte Carlo purchased

because I was going to be born,

because my grandmother could not

drive her grandbaby in a pickup 

truck or so she said.

The clouds are peaches

and cream tinged with lake water,

the kind that convince you the day

you just had was worth having,

the kind of clouds that make you

want to do it all over again—not the day,

but all of it. Born again, a child

again, subject to pain’s

pointillism. That kind

of cloud. The windshield made clean

by the multicolored melt.

The tunnel is ending 

but the light at the end says Relax.

I did not want those arms

to touch me. Never again. My little

voice—I had it then. When it’s over,

the light changes. It says go.

About the Author

Caitlin Cowan is the author of Solitary, winner of the Pamet River Prize (YesYes Books, 2027), and Happy Everything (Cornerstone Press, 2024). Her work has received support from the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, Hambidge Center for Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center. Cowan holds degrees from the University of North Texas, The New School, and the University of Michigan. She has taught writing at UNT, Texas Woman’s University, and Interlochen Center for the Arts. She serves as the Chair of Creative Writing at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp and is the creator of PopPoetry, a poetry and pop culture newsletter published regularly since 2020. She lives on Michigan’s west coast with her husband, their young daughter, and two mischievous cats.