You held my hand, leaned your head on my shoulder as we strolled,<\/p>\n
a warm Miami summer evening breeze caressing our teenage limbs.<\/p>\n
I was 15; just my acoustic guitar, faded coveralls and I hopped on that plane<\/p>\n
to meet you, my cousin’s cousin, the kid who blew up frogs at his father’s<\/p>\n
hippy wedding in the field, where I first learned the term “cow pie.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Five years later, you lost your baby lean and mean, grown taut with muscle,<\/p>\n
cut waist cool and long hair, the way we tagged ourselves in 1975.<\/p>\n
When my father drove the Rambler upstate, up Taghkonic Parkway to<\/p>\n
German Town, the five of us lived the farm life a few days, meeting our dinner,<\/p>\n
brown bunnies in the hutch by day, roasted “chicken” by night.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was there I re-met you for the fourth but first time, my father’s friend’s son,<\/p>\n
his sister’s husband’s sister’s son; were we related? I hoped not. And we<\/p>\n
toked and joked, even my father sat on the porch and smoked a jay, the first<\/p>\n
and last time, tobacco his lung poisoning of choice at the time. Your sister,<\/p>\n
just returned from the army, lay in the arms of another woman as I passed her room.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was the first time I knew what it was like to be free, though I believed I was<\/p>\n
in the new suburban neighborhood my father planted us in, his $1.50 an hour<\/p>\n
for 72 hours a week job, affording him the move from the city to the burbs. But the<\/p>\n
farm was cool, fresh garden greens, tomatoes, peppers, green onions, and weed.<\/p>\n
We stayed for the weekend, and I left with a pulsing heart and a new pen pal.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
You wrote to me in French, using the word “chat” for pussy, and even I knew that<\/p>\n
was wrong, and how did we manage to pull that off with both our families around?<\/p>\n
But we did, and I loved your letters but not as much as when you sang to me, the<\/p>\n
next summer, under a full Miami moon, amid the pink and blue summer homes,<\/p>\n
“Oh, I’m being followed by a moon shadow, moon shadow, moon shadow.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You held my hand, leaned your head on my shoulder as we strolled, a warm Miami summer evening breeze caressing our teenage limbs. I was 15; just my acoustic guitar, faded coveralls and I hopped on that plane to meet you, my cousin’s cousin, the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,441],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marathon-poem","category-poetry-prompt-responses"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69330"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69657,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69330\/revisions\/69657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}