i.

confession: you made me the most        daring        i have ever been.

there are sixty-

odd photos in your old canon camera, all taken 

on the ugliest day of the year. the inevitable houston september storm 

scrubbed 

our neighborhood empty: 

each street turned gray and bitter-smelling, the force of a weeping earth 

drawing every door shut and curtain closed. 

the earth, in all 

her sorrow, 

had given us a chance we hadn’t had before.

you dug your fingers into the skin of my timidness and 

pulled 

until it gave:

 your success was marked on my leg for a week 

afterwards, a bruise left 

from sliding under the gates of your old, chained-up middle school. the beautiful part 

was that 

nobody saw – 

when we snuck into the church, every whisper that would have lived in the pews 

was at home with all the curtains pulled shut.

confession: i know someone who started working at our 

old place. 

it made me       jealous,       in an odd way, to think 

of someone who could go there and 

stand it. 

or maybe it made me 

angry 

to think that someone took it upon themselves to go there after our 

time 

had 

passed, like a 

clueless child 

      walking over the 

burial plot of someone whose 

headstone they can’t read. 

iii.

confession: every day, my bike gets slower on the stretch past your house. 

every day, i nearly walk up onto your yard.

similarly to how i felt about 

our place, 

i found myself      frustrated      at the thought 

that 

other people

 are able to simply                pass 

your home. to pass it by as if it is just another house 

on the street, unassuming and   quiet. i could not 

think of a life where i wouldn’t pass 

your home and think, 

at least briefly, 

about the wonder that once lived there.