Why is everything always about money with you?
My best friend asks as we lean out
over the railing of the tattered tree house
my mom built before she left.
I'm offering to jump for fifteen dollars.
We are eleven years old and the summer heat
is turning us into real *******.
I tilt my head backwards to see the earth upside down
there are rusted bikes and shattered plastic buckets
splashed green from when we used to mow and faded from the sun.
There are walnuts and sticks that look like warty spears.
About twenty feet from the intended landing zone
a possum rots in the laser light slipping through the dark maple canopy.
Two days ago I bet the gang I would kiss it.
A breeze warms and cools us at the same time,
wafting the possum stench as we wave with it.
The support beams are rotting.
Last week we spray painted the worst spots
pink and green and dark purple.
We wrote our names too.
Sometimes we save our quarters for new wood.
Sometimes we laugh and smash the bowing boards.
Do termites love each other?
The neighbor girl told me they're going to Disney Land,
and last summer her dad bought her a second pony.
I have more dogs but no one's impressed.
I'm not actually sure that's a possum.
The horse broke its leg a few years back.
Mom tried to burn him but
Mr. Graber says animals are 70% water.
We picked through the bones until briers took over.
My shirt is stretched out in the neck
with a graphic of an 80's cartoon I've never heard of.
I'm not joking when I call it a hand-me-sixth.
As though I'd taken the jump
the wind is knocked right out of me.
I realize I've been staring.
I mean it to come out brave and angry but it comes as a squeak,
because I don't have any.
Because we don't have any.