She was the first one to get my gender right
Told me I was
Some kinda riverskip bellylaugh or something,
With maybe a bit of howl tucked away in the radioscratch bargain bin feralkitten squeak?
She had eyes like World War II era stethoscopes
Heard my heartbeat for every chipstutter leafcrackle sin and called me friend
We were eighteen but nobody ever took her to the DMV
So I bought her cigarettes with the shiniest bottlecaps I could find
While she sat in the grass junkyard behind the gas station
Drawing pictures of the things I saw with my eyes closed
I wasn't good at walking with two legs
She wasn't good at walking without singing the blues
We were the clumsiest musical
Silent as nobody's business
We dumpstered silk flowers from the craft store
Like just another coven of critters from the woods
Picking everything that looked like our dizzy old animal gods off the town like wild blueberries to weave into our nest
It wasn't our natural environment
But like rats found the city and squirrels found the suburbs
we got cozy
We made our home on the island where the river parts under the 7th street bridge
Our house was magic
Verdant
Sentient
A hundred feet tall
Winged and hydrated and echoing like a singing bowl
Glittery as snowfall wrapped in tinfoil moonshadow
With serpentine minarets
That tickled the underside of the highway
So whenever cars passed and rumbled our ceiling
Our ceiling rumbled them back
We were so proud to be the monsters under their bed
We picked every piece of broken glass from the riverside
And hung them from the rafters so at breakfast the traffic from the morning commute would sound like a hundred windchime bats settling in to sleep
It was just like how my lungs felt that spring
Every room was a ballroom with discarded cigarette floors and mini mart slushie cup trees all heavy with apple thoughts and apple jacks and apple cores and apple ghosts and apple mythologies stolen or otherwise
It was a crashpad for meteorite people
And we were the kings of infinite space
Our bed was a shopping cart full of feathers
We'd walked here over the water
Or pretended to
Our boots filled up and the wheels rusted shut like an eye infection on a pit bull in a Beatles song
But we believed ourselves
When we woke up with goose down stuck to our skin
We liked to pretend
We'd flown somewhere