The Eve of the Eve

I was on a street in my own neighborhood

terrifying in its ordinary strangeness.

It was wild and overgrown, with tracks in the snow

leading to old arrangements of curbs and hedges

and a faucet tangled in dark bindweed.

In order to be a welcome stranger

I had to be dressed like a movie star and able to fly,

in other words, a “city traveler” (words I misread somewhere)

so I was feeling kind of crazy, like I knew

anything could happen, and probably would.

I didn’t care, I wore my velvet cape and rhinestones.

I might get beat up for being the wrong color, or yelled at

for cutting through a yard, but if there was someone to tell it to

who’d laugh at the funny parts, it would be all right.

I was also chewing a piece of gum I peeled off the sidewalk

in warmer weather, and saved in my red purse.

It had sand in it but that didn’t bother me

because of my love for gum and all that it stands for,

the freedom to chew without swallowing,

to move my lips with nothing to say.

I crouched in the street to carefully pick up the shapes

tires left in new snow.

The sharp edges tasted good.

An older girl I didn’t know said I’d die if I ate them,

but I didn’t believe her, I only believed in things

if I liked how they fit the story I continuously told

to all my friends, like the old woman

on her front porch, who showed me

how to make evergreen perfume,

rubbing the crushed green buds on my wrists.

I worried about her future, all alone in the where-ever.

I wanted to keep her company in a snow globe,

frozen in time,

dreaming privately of adventures while I got shook up

then watching the plastic flakes float down.

I dreamed there was a place I knew by heart

and I was inside it, and lived there.