Do you remember December in the valley;
a time of fog burned off by heat?
Sun burned hot in the truck, warm like an oven,
my sisters and I small gingerbread cookies baking in the bench seat while Dad stops at the Nightcap on Main Street
where the giant neon martini glass
is tilted and almost spilling the massive olive
into the dusty parking lot?
It is cool and dark in the Nightcap; it smells of farmers and dirt.

Did you know the pretty lady with flame-red hair
who fed us cherries from the dish at the end of the bar;
gave us quarters to buy grape bubble gum?
Dad smiled a lot then, drank clear liquor
talked about cotton and rain.
Did you know how slowly the day called him out
until he packed us back in the truck oven
we sat, lined up and sleepy and smelling of grape and cherry.
We flew past dusty fields, past roads named Idaho and Kansas and
did you see us coming up on Jackson?

Jackson Road was a tangle of barbed wire buried deep in dirt,
a broken gate and twisted steel, a
car barreling past the stop sign.
Half-drowsy from the heat and the cherries t
that I could still taste on my tongue,
just before the windshield exploded into flying stars, I saw you,
a face in the windshield that was not mine.

We were laid like waifs in the weeds at the side of the road,
My leg was bent there and there and there.
Did you see the ambulances skid through the gravel:
they put us kids in one and the grownups in another?
You and I shared a bed, foot to head, I saw your face
through the windshield just before.

Did you see how I tried not to move?
Your clothes were ****** like mine, you were small like me,
but your hands hang limply while mine were fussily
hanging onto the rails, straining to keep the bed still for you.

When you sighed, the world changed.

Did you know that when we were unloaded, I went one way
where they pulled on my leg to straighten it
but they forgot to check my knee and ankle
so they pulled on it even more
months later and even more after that
until one day I told them
to stop pulling; it was crooked and would stay that way.

Like life.

But you, you went down a long white hall away from me
same as your mother, the last one unloaded from the grownup
ambulance because there is no hurry for the dead.

And did you know that at least your place was quiet
and they didn’t pull on you and sign your cast
and ask was your daddy drunk
and then turn away in disgust
when you threw up red cherries on the white floor?