we had been mopping
the kitchen floor all day
and the dirt never
stopped coming back

and earlier we had sprayed
the entire front porch
down with the garden hose
and now it was still wet
which made it feel as if
it had recently rained when in fact
the grass was a crunchy
brown carpet of regrets.

the night before we had
drunk orange smoothies
laced with lime and something
aged sleek and dark

(i think it must have been
the reason we couldn't
sleep that night
lay awake in my parents bed
and i told you why i
wouldn't go swimming
until the sun rose
the dog barked
the birds screamed
their morning songs
and my body stopped its
nightly spasms of fear.)

and the next evening
we put on a miranda lambert song
(the one we drank to
in your mother's van last winter)
sat on the wet
porch swing
and cracked open
our first beers

they were
really bad
i gagged
because it tasted
like carbonated
banana bread with
too much stale
baking soda
and we poured half of them
into the flower beds

the next morning
was sunday
and we had milk and muffins
in the kitchen with
simon and garfunkel
then went back out to the porch
drank iced coffee in the
eleven o'clock sunlight
and you said
"if this were a normal sunday
i would have been up at six
at church by eight
and done teaching my first
sunday school class by ten."

(is beer as much
of an acquired taste
as coffee is?
because i can't ever
remember not liking it
i used to think it was
bitter but i always
liked it anyway.)

i didn't say anything
because i didn't want to
say what was on the tip
of my tongue
that this kind of sunday
had become my normalcy
and our variety of saturday night
no longer felt like underage
drinking and more like
the way i was meant to be.