Neighbor
It is 8pm on a Thursday
I stretch my neck
and back my car out
just to go to the store
and I see my neighbor.
I know her from work.
Her skin is leather
and each freckle across her nose
is a day in the sun
and I see a whole life right there,
just across her face.
She looks up into my tail lights
away from her cigarette. She's scowling.
She's tough.
She spits that ash out of her mouth
and I give a nod of respect.
We both know what blood tastes like.
And in her window,
after I start to pull away,
the red light lingers.
Her son dances around the living room,
full of red light for the jungle
she's growing in there.
Green spills across every single wall
like sweat down her face.
It's sweetness.
I think about my poetry.
How I paid for these words in
blood and pain
how all I can write about is trauma.
I wonder if she feels the same
with a spray bottle in her hand
as I do with a pen.
And then I realize.
That's what it's all about.
It's all parallel lines running toward
the same edge of the paper.
There is a delicacy in all of us
that begged me to pick up my pen.
To take pictures with my tongue
hold them up and say
"Hey, aren't these the
same thing?"
It's 8pm on a Thursday
and when I get back from the store
I see her again through the window
and she's smiling.
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