Take me back to last summer
To 4am laying on a damp blanket
Under a dark sky sprinkled with stars,
The quiet envelope of night,
Next to a warm breathing body,
An entity of love
To slowly closing eyes and then
To open them and find that
streak of light sprint across the night canvas
Your hand squeezes mine as you say
“Did you see that?!”
“Yes,” I say but the stars are only beautiful
Because they are here with you
And now we are back in your car
The heat is turned on high and
I am wrapped in your blanket
Falling asleep in your passenger seat
I thought for sure I’d kiss your lips tonight
But our relationship is still young,
and we are both so shy
So I let you kiss my cheek - that is enough
You look so beautiful
even now
At five in the morning
with tired eyes, a sleepy smile
And a drowsy sway
Amazing,
Simply amazing
Just like the night sky.
Sep 4, 2017
Sep 4, 2017 at 2:35 AM UTC
Melrose street had a quaint little house that sat perched on the corner.
The inside was bare and small and plain,
the dust in the air hung still, motes visible in shifting sunlight.
I would bang open the back door with a clatter and run
past the swing-set to the gate dividing my yard from the next.
The girl there had hair the same golden silk as her dog’s.
And I’d scrape my knees on that fence more times than I could count.
There I would play, I would climb her trees and then
drain the sweetness from all the honeysuckles in her yard,
the summer air enveloping me in its heavy embrace.
Heritage was a new housing division,
many houses under construction stood empty, just skeletons.
I’d walk through the layout, a throat coated in dust
and sit on the roof as colors faded from the sky.
It was in those streets that I broke my wrist and
my mom did not believe my pain.
My parents fought hard and often
about big things and about little things
and this skeleton house was no longer any home of mine.
Inside, the walls reverberated with every cry and
the holes punctured the once smooth interior,
and no matter how much **** wall putty was slathered on
you could see the jagged shape of imperfections,
the tearstained cheeks that never dried.
A constant reminder.
“Foreclosure” was a term I was unfamiliar with,
I just knew that the paper taped to our front door
meant we had to leave.
So we grabbed our items and began the trek from one
cramped space to the next, a multitude of changing environments,
never being able to stay in one place for more than a year.
And my parents no longer loved each other and I didn’t know why,
A rumpled love note with a lie, “I love you for always and forever”
the only evidence that hate wasn’t always in their lives.
I began to miss the sunny days of my childhood.
Of scraped knees and honeysuckles when everything,
Including the dust motes, were in place and comprehensible.
Apr 30, 2017
Apr 30, 2017 at 11:14 PM UTC