Feet-Off-Ground

I’ll remember it, the last time she

called the landline—June? June of 2020

and I, like a cautious seabird accepting

the sticky crumbs from our boardwalk

soft-serve cones, June of 2011, June

so we should see each other again, before

it gets cold, before we’re off to opposite ends

of the state of New York, for lemon-raspberry

water ice slurped up in the dim parking lot

near where we swim in separate lanes now

Paul McCartney’s latest trickled

out the window as we tried to discern

whether the man staring from the car by

the motel was moving his arm—she

drove me home from suburb to suburb

it wasn’t long past sunset, so we sat

for one hour more, door cracked open

as I leaned frozen in the second before

departing, like the night we lay on the blue

hood of her family’s camper, stargazing

June, 2011, we’d hopped up when a train

thundered past her house near the tracks

as we waited for me to get picked up;

we had this superstition born of recess,

you had to get your feet off the ground

—or some said you had to duck, curl up

into a little ball, but either way you’d be safe

there—making a choice, we sprung onto

the car hood as the SEPTA moaned ahead

and we stayed there, tucked under Orion’s Belt,

Little Dipper cradle, how lovely the very sky

that enveloped us in darkness was—June of

2020, June, something else entirely thundered

through our brain-frozen heads then, didn’t it?

I still shudder when I hear the Metro North