You Never Outgrow the Hometown Blues

In your mind you’ll always be a sun-gold child, stretched-out limbs in cut-off shorts, loitering with intent in high school halls to a hair-rock soundtrack. We hear the locker doors slam. and bounce your words away.

On the blanched curve of the dike boys dance the old soft-shoe with other girls. They are blind to your passing as you cruise by with your muddy river song.

Your name is synonymous with a short story in the town’s long memory, shelved like awkward school pictures on your mother’s mantlepiece.

Maybe you flew with a mayfly’s lust, slick dying in the streets, but that ghost haunts only your timeline. It’s not in the yearbook photos.