By Bex Peterson, Editor-in-Chief
They couldnât pay you to stay here
(and itâs not like they tried).
It wouldnât be worth the ghosts
of concrete, ripped up in the aftermath;
abandoned basketball hoops,
that one place we hid in the bushes
when we were small enough that the juniper boughs
stretched like trees above
our dirty little heads.
The buses are always full to bursting
(everyoneâs trying to get out of the suburbs).
It takes three bridges to get anywhere good
and youâre always a little too late or
three hours too early.
We drove past his house last night
(and past a cop car: âDrugs, probably,â you said, bored).
You told me he moved north, that the Jeeps in the driveway
werenât his. I offered to fight him
and was drunk enough to mean it.
Hell; Iâd fight him anyway.
Just like the guy I buy beer from at the store up the road;
in high school he called me a slut and I slapped
a red handprint in his pockmarked cheek.
Now I hand him my money and
we donât make eye contact.
(I think we both thought weâd be somewhere else by now.)
They couldnât pay me to stay here
(and itâs not like they try).
The forest eats our secrets
but the bad memories never keep to the shadows
because it all went down in broad daylight
and that was the worst part.
But itâs a scrappy kind of place
and Iâm a scrappy kind of person.
I donât hate it nearly as much as I want to
and I donât hate it nearly as much as I pretend.
