Reading Julia Pope’s Route 114 both out loud and to myself is an experience. Aloud, my tone matches the seperated beats of the lines. To myself, I read thinking of everything at once. Having the poem to be lowercase rather than capitalized where needed gives off an emphasis that strengthens the poem’s message. Route 114 is powerful, breathtaking, and overall, everything a poem should be. Pope does an incredible job of flowing from topic to topic yet keeping everything connected.

Some of the best lines throughout Pope’s poem are the ones that hit close to home, “my path reaches into the stratosphere/loops around planets/tunnels through stars/dips into black holes, new galaxies/and curves into whatever my imagination/may demise” being one of them. Simply put– I can’t focus. I run off-topic and I can’t find the words to say what I want to. My imagination, at times, is too much for me. Paranoia sets in, and I imagine that the people next to me, across the street, talking online–or whatever the case may be–are talking about me. They’re ridiculing me, laughing at me, talking about me, and it’s unsettling. For me, my mind is exactly what Pope describes throughout Route 114–“demons that command obedience/echo negativity” and “...a freeway/an asphalt path of fixed dimensions/yellow lines that stretch on the sides for all/ of known infinity”.

An issue Julia Pope addresses throughout the poem is liberty and justice. The lines, “the bluebirds that sing are nothing but vultures/and the edge of your culture’s coins read:/in the truly gruesome do we trust/hit in the face with a sucker punch” convey the irony of the lines “with liberty and justice for all” because we can’t pretend that everyone has always been equal. We can’t sit around and pretend that slavery wasn’t a thing, that people weren’t seperated and ostracized due to race. We can’t ignore the fact that women are still sexualized and that sexism is still a thing today, that islamophobia doesn’t affect anyone, or that racist slurs aren’t tossed around like empty words.