(no subject)

[aliceinwonders]

of the queen anne's lace veining out
through all my odd geographies,
my startled departures.

of the ashland train station
where we rode the soot-screaming
commuter rail to Boston,
watched the cold passengers,
watched the suburbs stumble past us
in grainy rust-light

of the lime-lit hospitals and dollar coffee
and gas station trash and
bleeding grafitti of the granite quarry,
where we dipped our skinny legs, where we hoped
to survive the wash black of that
wicked water.

of gummy and gumpy's house
and the guns in the basement,
the forsythia on the terrace,
the lost chickens and wounded horses,
stacks of hemmingway and virginia woolf
kept warm over the crawling cicadas,
the aunts laugh-cackling and the japanese
maple shadowing our bodies sticky
with sweat and mayflies, cigarettes and soil and
the work of a tired man's hands.

of the cold that lasts too long,
that always gets to you.

of skunk cabbage and dogwood trees
and blackberry bush and that game
where I was a river and you were a
bolt of lightning, where you were a hero
and I was a hailstorm.

of the hard tack in your accent
of what we lost at lake whitehall
of the walk between the slaughterhouse
and the cemetery and the day we
dressed like clowns and
danced between the beech trees.

of that ice that slicked the driveway,
that slicked our feet and fingers and tongues,
that made our people so cruel and cold and quiet,
like blades of bark on the birch trees, like the
still breath you take before singing, before the
summer comes.