The Corner of Lakeshore Drive and Sunset Avenue

in childhood, where the war is never won,

where the windows, their pulley cords long snapped

fall like an execution on chipping frames,

where pink clouds coil around the necks of the mountains,

and the battle song hisses from the throats of asthmatic swans,

where a skinned knee is a factory of ransom notes,

where we had a burrow of beads and rat bones

in the clay, dug with our fingernails and covered

with shale, where the creek frothed and bubbled

with the indignity of spreading its banks for the golf course,

where we lived from sundown to dawn

with secrets backfiring down our throats,

willing ourselves to swallow