3.29.15

salute

holding onto the chains of a swing set
smiling so big it disappears her eyes she is a little girl
covered in tattoos and sass, so country she one time
yanked a racoon had got stuck in my garage door and died,
hung who knows how many days till i did a double take
out the back window, saw the thing suspended by a paw--
anyway she came over, asked for a trash bag and
just grabbed it down and threw it away. the hand remained
lodged so she freed it like it was nothing while we
dry heaved, her laughing like we were something else, alright.

wanted to be a poet so i asked her to write something.
she exhibited the grammar i might have done at age nine
comprehensibly articulating her POV when she
was five and he hand fucked her for the millionth time.
it nearly blew me the editor in me was able to discern the
art lived in those mispelled words of this misused girl.

anyway she shot herself dead with a gun a year ago.
i cried three days when it happened, had to let it go, knew
i cld not afford a sustained sadness at that time it was
for me the very question of survival. i was a trucker she
didnt want to anymore and that was fine because this
girl from bumfuck ohio left the best legacy: she was
always kind and even God texted me to ask why.

her daddy was a drunken loser. her step introduced heroin
to her small town. her brother helped turn that into
something lucrative and took turns at the loony bin
while her mother fucked a man two yrs her elder and
she tried to make it on her own in cold cleveland.
we had the best of times.