Eaves
Do you remember that corner store?
The one we would go to after school?
When we were all toiled by the sun,
in white uniforms forever stained from playing with muddy basketballs.
Do you remember?
The corner store with the two wooden wicker chairs out front,
the ones we would finish our ice creams on while swinging our legs,
the ones we would shiver in when our feet finally touched the ground,
the ones that cradled our bodies as we grew.
I went to find that corner store today.
To seek the eaves that echoed our childhood.
To seek the eaves that shaded our smiles.
Smiles that reached the eyes.
Smiles that were shielded from all glares.
I wanted to see whether it still stood.
I wanted to see the shapes of my memories.
You know I can never find my directions,
but we had walked there every day for years.
I remember the way.
You had made sure of that.
You showed me all the routes, the shortcuts, the detours.
I know where it is.
But all is gone.
I can’t find it.
The silhouettes we had cast as children,
the silhouettes we traced in chalk and relined each day.
And the wall that we had recorded our days by chalking a new petal before we left.
We kept ourselves there.
I kept myself there.
And so I had knelt on the searing concrete,
where the chairs once carried us.
Bare knees on the gravel, trying to find all that was.
But though blood met and sank into the cracked concrete, and into the soil beneath,
trying,
to find us,
I am simply losing the flesh that holds me to find a wisp of all that was.
I am sitting, cross-legged on the concrete that scalds.
My hands are tracing over the new edges on my knees, picking the sediments from the torn skin, letting the blood trickle down slowly onto the ground.
I don’t have chalk on me, so let this blood circle this body,
draw this body,
and save it into the ground.
Let the lines of red seep through,
let my ink reline all that has faded and gone,
and may I find the eave by sinking beneath,
between each pebble,
merging with any drop of moisture,
and collapsing all of this body.
Because maybe when all is dark, may this body know that it is again, below an eave, shaded.
