Backroads
Walls of green around us, like ancient bricks
Lost in time, unaware of the world
Taking in sunlight and emissions from cars passing by
Growing more beautiful as the creatures around them try to not give in to fear
Please don’t forget when we met
there was plenty of hope in my eyes and
spirit flowing through my veins.
Please remember me as the girl
who fell in love with you
and not the woman
you broke in the end.
Unfold those letters I wrote to you-
just streams of consciousness.
Could I not shed light on
every good part of you and
help you forget the filth
and the darkness?
Please don’t forget I was once
lovely and unscathed.
We didn’t get to say goodbye
so I made an effigy of you,
of sticks and pebbles and mud-covered leaves,
to set outside my bedroom window.
I wonder if I could have saved you from
yourself if I had told you that you would never leave my heart.
Perhaps I should have said that the grief
(and guilt) that rages around in the floorboards of my house
would make me want to burn
and wither away
(just like you did)
But we didn’t even get to say goodbye.
Should I have known better than to not drown your phone
with arguments for living? Or should I pray for absolution,
that this fiery pain will one day too
burn out?
I never ever tore out a whole floor
down to the dirt, down
beneath the dirt, down into
the water table, down
further than metaphor to where
your problems are purely
substantial. Did you
dig deep enough? But
did you really
though? Will your inexpert weaving
of rebar and metal wire
support what you have
cemented
through decades,
through centuries?
Will they support children, the
children of children, footsteps upon footsteps,
for how long? I carelessly
throw the old joists into my a10yarddumpster,
each older than my grandmother’s mother,
from oaks older than her mother’s mother,
laid by hands long rotted into the dirt,
and I sprinkle the rotting cord with crumpled Miller Lite cans
like some wayward flower girl.
We replace them with 2x10s from Menard’s.
We jump on the OSB and marvel — the strongest thing I’ve ever built.
I cross my fingers. This is just how it is these days.
That guitar looks pretty
Waiting by the mini-fridge
Even though it sounds ugly
Beneath untrained hands
Heavy with potential
Tapped down with anxiety
And string-sore fingertips
Moaning out flat Ds
But
Like the words can’t write
She ain’t gonna learn to play herself
Habit, from the Latin habere,
to possess; to have in mind;
to manage, to keep
A culmination
in skies above Saint Albans
clusters gave closure
Memorial shines
ashes entombed in starlight
empyrean fields
The squad moves northwest, toward the square and the mayor’s house, following the rough stone path between the walled-off nuns’ house and the raised churchyard cemetery. Trailing, their sergeant has turned, not to look at the camera but where they’ve been, wary of ambush, not wanting a Purple Heart and white cross for any of them, not after all these days and miles since the beach.
Ten years from now, there’ll be a celebration in the crossroad beyond the square, commemorating liberation. Boys not born yet, too young to think of shaving, still with high voices in the choir Sunday morning, will don uniforms and carry arms to replicate these soldiers. It will be a bittersweet afternoon, with older brothers already gone to fight the next war, too many buried far away, laid to rest by people who in time will mark the anniversary of the victory young strangers purchased.
What devastating,
sucking
