Oregon Beach Town 2016

At 13, I smoked in the California sweet shoppe bathroom with the older girls.

My sister’s friends called me Volup Bear, and mother loaned them her car.

Pebbles spun as two boys raced down the dark hill, wet night glittering

up the other side. I knew enough to get the car driven home.

Nothing to prevent these rites of passage, even stealing beer

from my father’s men’s club pool, even guzzling a fifth of whiskey.

 

At the beaches and rivers on my belly in hot sand, I tested the power of cleavage.

Ecstacy a set of doors, beckoning.

In the forest at home, my brother was selling smoke by smoke

Mommy’s Marlboros; his leukemia came when we moved to Oregon.

The tumbling of this scaffolding surprised me when I awoke;

friends gone, house gone, just sooty skies and snotty, Oregonian kids.

 

Still like that; my son can’t quit smoking, his girlfriend too.

The grandson swears he’ll never start, but addictions lurk like fish.

Next time I visit Oregon, winter months will rule the tsunami zone;

waves big as apartments, in my dreams my father’s hand reaching out.

My sister assures me I am welcome in her toy town with one of everything.

We could die together; it’s heavenly in the zone; we never turn our backs on the sea.

Then there are the feral people in forests on the hills wherein lie houses with hydrangeas.

The ferals descend and nod, just like everyone else. Every day a beach holiday, she says.

None of us, she says, go far into the forest alone. Their home is our escape from the zone.

The towns’ people smile and talk and greet as if long-time students of Mr. Roger’s.

I return to a thoroughfare designated mine, tumbling waterfall days.

My people, watermelon sunsets, my luckeee oasis in the city.

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