All those cars,
parking lots and backseats
that varied in size,
according to what decade the car came from.

The more recent models had hardly any space at all.
No choice
but to push against the other person
and see what they were really made of.

Nights where she was looking
for a pair of eyes in a thousand different hair styles.

She was sixteen
and had the apartment all to herself
about ninety-five percent of the time.

Her sister was always out of town.
Whenever she did visit it was usually only long enough
to come in through the bedroom window,
drift around the room, cast a weird light on TV’s 2 a.m. blizzard
and then disappear with the room a good deal colder than when she got there.

Sixteen,
and she was spending most days
writing, grocery shopping and wondering
why it was so hard to commit to a TV show.

Even a rerun. One of those shows
that survived for years with nothing important to say.

Strangers would even tell her when to laugh,
and that was just appealing all over the place.

The surrounding town wanted to be
a city more than most people want a new line of credit,
but it was too old and too southern for anything better
than a Barnes and Noble near the Piggly Wiggly.

She didn’t mind.
There were more than a dozen bars,
and the population always tripled by nine p.m.

God knows where they came from,
but they were as reliable as classic rock radio,
and they thought she was just the neatest little thing.

She laughed if there were bits of her hair
between their fingers, and she never needed
someone to help her off the floor.

Sometimes
she’d get out of the state
and lose weeks in those cities
where all the street signs were underwater.

People would cough into their hand
if she asked them where she was. Not that she asked very often
or ever with a serious tone.

All that free time had to go somewhere.

Pretty impressive
that she always made it back home
and always found money to live on
in the knothole of an Angel Oak Tree.

Living was never a problem.
It was just all that free time she couldn’t stand.
It was even worse when the power went out,
the car wouldn’t start or the phone went dead.

Those thunderstorms
were even known to creep up
the stairs from time to time.

01/30/2010

Posted on 01/30/2010
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