Long years after we’d wandered finally apart
and you’d cut your hair and sold your truck,
and we spoke only long enough to share stories
of hiking trails rimmed in ragged weeds
like small hellos from another life,
I landed outside your hometown. It was my first time,
but I knew the washed-out Welcome sign,
the airbrushed food truck selling knockoff Dole Whip
from the pharmacy parking lot;
if I forced the realtor’s ad from the lawn
the house was as you’d drawn it: vinyl siding gone
sun-bleached, kitchen shutter off-kilter,
fence panel broken and blocked closed by bricks
from the burned-out bakery a mile away.
I could picture you there, gangly preteen,
elbows crossed over handlebars and waiting
for a break in traffic, overloaded backpack
heavy between your shoulders.
I’d missed the turning as we passed it—
the last conversation before we stopped seeing.
Here was an ache: hazed in memories you’d fed me
in the corners of dark kitchens, never gone, not entirely,
but stoked back to life without warning, a probing thumb
poked roughly into an overripe tomato.
