honey & lime

Cottage Road​

The name of the girl across the street

shone like copper. 

 

In the apartment below 

a teen with a Mohawk     

 

was already imagining the bomb 

that would explode his hand

 

into bloody petals. 

When the leaves turned that year 

 

the kids from the tenement 

took turns jumping off the roof 

 

of an empty house and called it flying. 

I stood off to one side--

 

tried to explain the dangers 

of broken things, the treachery of glass. 

 

Later, the boy with stitches 

in a crooked line across his ass 

 

would call me a witch but that night

the neighborhood stray

 

found its way up the stairs

to my room, its fur wild 

 

and warm against my face. 

It was the beginning 

 

of aloneness and of love.