Objects In Mirror

            All around me are ghosts.  Empty storefronts, dilapidated factories, marquees with letters missing, graffiti tags now grave markers of these American dreams.   I drive past cracked sidewalks, weeds growing through the fissures, imagining crocheted lace curtains where bars now decorate windows. 

            This house here, I remember when the front door wasn’t boarded shut, and I’d play old maid out on the stoop with Jimmy Lee while his mom fixed us up grilled cheese sandwiches and tall glasses of kool-aid. 

            Sun rays glare off broken shards of a liquor bottle carelessly discarded in the street.  I remember the days when we walked barefoot on this same asphalt.  Our feet burned the whole way to Mrs. Dancy’s, where we’d dance for hours under her lawn sprinklers.

            I can still see Jimmy Lee standing there was his drenched red hair dripping into his eyes, nervously wiping it away before leaning in to kiss me for the very first time. 

            The Dancy house is gone.  In its place is an impound yard with a rusted up el camino polluting the most significant moment of my young life. 

 

            “Mom, can we go?”  My daughter breaks the trance. Sitting there, the sun in her eyes, she looks so much like I did then.  “Mom?”

            “Yeah, let’s go.”

 

            I watch the remnants of an ancient world shrink in the rearview mirror. 

I’m going home.

Reviews

[Henry Daube]

"The Dancy house is gone. In its place is an impound yard with a rusted up el camino polluting the most significant moment of my young life."

goes well with me

is good, miss