rooms, I needed space.
I needed a 3x3 foot square, concrete
with distinctly carved lines
and no breaks
or cracks along the edges.
Definition of my boundaries
always gives me the heads up
on how far I can go.
She and I came from different places
but found ourselves at the corner
of Core and 21st
like we were magnets pulled there.
She needed the space to learn to live
outside herself, finally.
I needed the space because
I had never had any to call my own
And we would scream to each other
filling back alleys
with our high school frustrations
echoing down train tracks
about the boys that done us wrong
'til the water rose at the Hague inlet
pushed back as if our voices were lunar
movements requiring the shift,
the rising and falling of water.
Her dad was in the military too.
Different branch than my own but
the experience was the same.
Her family stayed together.
And she was smart in that she-was-so-smart-and-beautiful
I-can't-stand-to-look-at-her kind of way.
So you had to love her.
She never minded
that her sidewalk square was missing
a corner to moss.
I came from a broken home full
of love and hope. My ambitions
a neon sign above my head
"Last Hope!" I resented being
the youngest, always doing
right what others had done wrong.
I need to yell this to the world,
still
from a stage, from the corner,
from the place no-one knows inside me.
Nine years have passed since those
corner therapy sessions with Kara.
We still met when she's in town
filling our nights with dancing
and beer to quiet our frustrations.
I find us, more often than not, sharing
long goodbyes in parking lots and on street corners
trying to reclaim the spaces opposite one another
where we knew who we were.
(c)cheryl snow white
from her chapbook, snow white lies
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