Welcome to our series “Love Poems to Cat Callers”! Every week we’ll bring you a new poem by Teresa Spencer, read by a different woman celebrating the joy that is being sexually degraded on the street. This week, Anne Thériault reads her tender homage.

To the Trucker

A prose poem to the trucker who blasts his air horn at women as he passes on the right, making them startle — and twist ‘round — and wonder — are my brights on? No. It’s a blue midmorning, and I’m pretty sure I see your fingers waggling suggestively in the rearview as you pull away, leaving me with only a memory, a hairy patch of elbow jutting from the driver’s side window. A whisper of exhaust. Our connection — so fleeting. Your come-on — so appealing. What is your number? How do I date you? I see you sanding the wooden rungs of our children’s treehouse ladder, driving me in the cab of your big rig to my colonoscopies, holding my paper-thin wrist in your flat, chappy palm as I slip — cherished, beloved — from this world. Another love lost to the dotted yellow line disappearing over the horizon.