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sarah fran May 2015
on the way home tonight
I took the route
you usually do,
going straight here
and turning left there
mostly because it took me
past your house
and I could look at
the muted light behind your windows
and wonder

if you were reading or
watching television or
eating dinner or
not even there or
wondering about me too.

but also because it took me
just a little bit longer
to reach my destination
and through the looking
and the wondering
I could enjoy the night
just a little bit longer.
I prefer darkened side streets
to thirtyfivemilesperhour streetlamp-lit thoroughfares.

the shadows crowding the road
and the contented blankness
of the houses
make the music louder
and the thoughts deeper
and the loneliness lesser.
sarah fran May 2015
When we were kids
we liked to open the plastic kitchenette,
don our aprons,
and assemble the baby dolls.

"Playing house,"
we called it.

Sometime I was the mother,
or we were both children,
and mother simply wasn't home.

We created worlds
in that corner of the basement,
loosely based on the facts of our lives.

"I'm stuck in traffic; I'll be late for dinner."
"Daddy's out of town this week."
"Your brother is home from college this weekend."

And now, we're not even friends,
first of all.
separated by some fourth grade quarrel
and 700 miles.

But "house" is no longer
the fun it used to be.
There are no aprons.
The kitchen isn't made of plastic.
The babies are human, not dolls.
I'm a sister,
not a mother,
yet I cook and clean and worry all the same.

"Playing house,"
I call it,
since I so readily assume
those roles we pretended at
so long ago.
sarah fran May 2015
I like the smell
of pavement
after rain.

It reminds me of camping trips
from when I
was a kid.

I would lay awake
listening
to the rain hitting the tarpaulin roof.

ping
              (pong)
ping

A symphony of raindrops
sounded like golfballs
to my childish ears.

I imagined a barrel
tipped over
with those dimpled spheres cascading

into the
           air and onto
                           the roof of the camper.

But in the morning
I would step outside and
would only be met with the smell of the rain.

— The End —