Our dirtbags, our dirtbags
were medicine men.
They spoke as oracles,
capped bottles, skated
razorblades across
the glass of pictures.
It’s just like shoveling snow,
laughed our dirtbags
as they unburied
their parents’ faces.
Like raking leaves,
want to try?
We watched their hands
swap bills, our eyes
the wrong kind of wild.
Our dirtbags laughed:
You can sit with us
while we finish.
This was intimacy:
our sitting, their finishing.
We laughed; we returned
frames to their shelves.
We bought shadows dark
and lip stains darker. Darker,
said our dirtbags, damp
on basement couches.
We envied in secret
the laughs of bright girls,
high as their hair
pinned in hard, slick curls.
They spun like acrobats
in the high school gym,
strobing in glitz
we were disallowed.
Bitches, spat our dirtbags,
skanks, whichever
words coaxed our laughter.
We swallowed them
like expectorant
and laughed in wet coughs
under canopies
of parking lot trees,
our arms crossed as though
coffined already.
We rolled in our dirtbags’ scent
like hunting dogs,
napped in stuffy rooms
as their hands, their hands
blessed guns, made backpacks
heavy with Ziploc holy.
It’s all good, laughed our dirtbags.
Our hips, our ponytails
swayed easy as leaves.
By summer, our dirtbags
wore sly, deep pockets,
weighed powders,
held capsules to the light
under a jeweler’s loupe.
The car windows glided,
phones lit up like lightning
bugs on the shoulders
of gravel roads. Such soft light,
light of vigils, light the yellow
of a forgiven bruise.
We rode to neighboring towns
of missing teeth and needles.
We cried in bathrooms
far from home. We were home
when we laughed, when we laughed
we laughed Everclear vomit.
But our dirtbags, our dirtbags
let us sit while they finished,
and their hands were warm
as stones pressing us to sleep.
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