| Stark Blessing i get to your house without ever groping for directions you are in the roads and thinking of you, i find the way again and again Foolhardy, we take the wrong way on the Mass Pike � Ralph Nader posters and cereal boxes in the back seat i hope we look like two girls on an adventure We are assaulted by rain, drive straight through and turn around as the sun erupts over a rest stop vending machine trailer the road fills our spaces like an ultimate blessing until night when bed time is stark and crowded, you wrap yourself in all the blankets and the moon guards us four girls at the edge of a lake at the edge of leaving and waking we hide the emotions but not the fact of our tangled nights | 1 2 3 4 5 6 home |
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for Hannah on the eve of her seventeenth birthday she needs a cigarette so we climb out the window. it would be romantic if you weren�t so nervous, gripping the edge of the sill, loosing a sandal in the gap between bush and house. Red hair and pale skin you lie on the grass in the dark half silhouetted by the light from her parent�s window. There are no stars. I try to reflect the ember of her cigarette in my eye to show you but you just lie there. You could be the Lady of Shallot, floating to Camelot. But you start senior year tomorrow and even college has no castles to offer. We sleep in the guest bed and without my glasses I glance at you, breath and gravity escape me. I wish I could tell you this, but though you talk constantly there is more said in our silences and stories of your past that fall into my lap like cigarette ash Memorial in Syllables this is for Fred Martinez, Jr. this is for Brandon Teena and Juan Barron, J.R. Warren, Jr. and this is for the bar, this is for leaving the bar, this is for darkness and firewood and broom handles and guns. this is for spilled blood. Vanessa Lorena Ledesma, Berdardino Verastique and Alina Marie Barragan. this is for Barry Winchell and� this is for my brothers and sisters the immortalized ones the ones God and Media forgot. this is for fields and streets for rainbows and holding hands this is for all of us who awaken to say it could have been me, it could have been you Matthew Shepard, Regan Wolf and Richard Reihl this is for Willie Houston, Terrianne Summers and Aaron Webber this is a memorial in syllables because they will never erect one in stone for you after candle wax� has dripped onto dirt and the light leaves silence behind |