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Jumping Fences
Did you know you’re trespassing?
Gated communities with white pickets; white teeth.
All of their new blood rushes towards leagues of Ivy and ROTC gold.
Loud engines.
Window signs.
(He’ll be governor some day.)
Do you think those colors will be shouted in their epitaphs? White marble with
Fresh flowers every week—corpses on corpses.
Do I need to call you a cab?
Or are you ACAB enough to find your own way home?
My mother used to attend punk concerts in shadowy churches,
And jump fences in heels—all thrifted clothes and laughing spite.
She tells me how she used to scream
By the train tracks, and watch glass shatter from junkyard rooftops.
She was a dancer, you know—that crowd, brimming with cocaine and counting ribs;
She watched a boy carve his arm open hospital-deep,
And she tells me about all of her dead friends who got surgeries and changed their names
To the scorn of their observers—
And the druggie with the liberty spikes, who dosed too heavy—
And the guy whose mother used to keep heterosexual porn on the living room TV
As though she could brainwash him out of what he had no say in being.
She tells me this, out by her backyard garden, in her sundress, backed by the bricks of our
Middle-class home, and she tells me
About the backseat of a cop car, and the front lawn of a drunk friend’s house, and we talk
About sex, and religion, and revolution, and—
Everything her parents never did.
Did you know you’re trespassing?
Peeling pickets with honeybee mailboxes; honeybee summers.
The scores to wear the Ivy crown, but too many teeth to wear it nicely.
Loud engines.
Window signs.
(She’ll kill the governor some day.)
Cremate me when I’m dead, my mother tells me, and I already know I’ll want the same:
Not to lie in the shadow of white marble when we could feed the sun with our carbon.
Are you aware that you’re loitering?
I’m going to have to ask you to find your way home.
Copyright ©
Scorpio Fleming
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