new poem

Residential Doubles

we woke to shrill lashes
of parental static and stayed still
until I crept into your mother's
pharmaceutical pantry for a few
more handfuls. It was

summer when the walls were
too thin to not spy on eachother, when
her pleasure arrived in sharp cries
through the hall and into my room and
into my arsenal. They found us

passed out at the
Shiloh Recreation Center, and
according to mirrors, we were older,
still skating the broken diameter of
a non-city spent under
spells of syrup and ether, past
echoes of other nights, names
not remembered, plaza to plaza
before cutting through the Health Park
on the way to your house. By the time

I zeroed out in Osprey,
you'd already forgotten me, and
life became a series of
unanswered phone-calls, some of
which make some of me still
feel guilty for forgetting you
not entirely. For weeks,

I hid in garbage bins and crashed
through fences, into backyards where
stepdads scrambled for reefer,
shirtless and full of anger, outside,
where we would duck in through the back
and watch
sisters act like sisters
before settling on poppers,
and later, again, I became
your shoulder until it was
time to go, until she

tripped over an uncoiled hose
and hurt her skull and hated me
for the rest of her life.