Summer came and went with a lilac breeze.
She reaches out the passenger window
as if to catch it, as if the leaves
hadn't changed years ago,
as if the car won't
return to her
childhood
home.
You will come home for the holidays,
briefly, hurriedly, the cruel words,
"This place hasn't changed a bit,"
on your lips,
and she and
your mother will
purposely spend the next
summer forgetting that
you have become a stranger.
She will pretend to forget
the scripts under her bed,
the boy she spent her youth
committing to memory,
the man he has grown into,
the woman she failed to
become.
But, for now,
the leaves feel like an embrace,
like the arms of a boy who
looked at her like she was
a home worth fighting for;
the cicadas shriek their war cry,
releasing their old skins,
relinquishing a life that
grew too small to contain them;
did they meet you at the train station?
She drives home.
YOU ARE READING
HEAVENLY CORRUPTION
PoetryThe ramblings of a woman who spent too much time in confession and too little time trying to figure out what exactly she was apologizing for.
