We spent that summer
on the porch,
lemon juice in our hair,
quenching thirst with sunshine
and her reading verses of Whitman
Trying to whiten our smiles
and darken our collarbone-skin

An empire of gravity
had taken hold that summer
rooted in our mother, stretching taut the barriers
of our home.
and we clenched our fists with something like victory,
but not quite.
Not quite.

The sycamore tree was struck by lightning
at the end of that summer
but it didn’t fall.
Its cracks dripped from its trunk,
ribbons of blood and syrupy threads and
parched nostalgia

The day our father filled with his coming
as the moon on sunny water,
we went up in our
top-floor room
and dropped peanut shells
from the window
into the overgrown garden
below.

We didn’t listen
to the sound of our mother’s hysteria
climbing the walls that summer
the hints she dropped like bombs that summer
now we were good enough-
I mean old enough,
to make decisions for ourselves.
A forced shrug/thirsting reminder
he hadn’t come
when we were young and
burdensome, but had chosen that summer,
That seventeenth summer.

We snuck past first-floor storms,
that simple summer,
back to the wooden porch and baking soda,
perched sunshine and slightly paler hair.
The decision we made was something like creation but not quite,
Not quite