This Town

You might tell yourself you want to leave. Hell,
you might want to leave. This town, this stinking town,

the woods and cornfields that lured you from home
late at night while your parents slept, bulldozed

for strip malls and surface parking. Once you could lie
in the tall grass with the boy you loved, the deer

just feet away, and never be found. You haven’t been
kissed like that in years, pressed to the earth in a place

you called nowhere because there was nothing
to fence in. You might have dreamt it except for

the details: the taste of drugstore wine, the speckled
fawn staring, not even flicking an ear. Acorns

pinged a barn roof and rolled in the gutters
like arcade pinballs. Bats darted at the treeline,

half-drunk, hungry for your hair. Face it, your life
is not what it was. The boy you loved is a dozen

years behind you, whatever that translates to in miles.
He’s married to someone else and has a daughter,

and so do you. His parents don’t live in the house
you crept to, the house in the sticks. Teenagers now

can’t have what you had in this town—nowheres
all along Old 3-C highway, hawks appearing wherever

you went like a talisman, the crickets in stereo,
tricking you into believing they had you surrounded.

But the creek still runs cold behind the house
where your parents raised you, where they live,

and the deer still find their way to the backyard
somehow, deep in the suburbs. They materialize

behind the house and just as quickly, they’re gone.