My Teacher Said I Shouldn't Worry About Writing About The Same Old Thing

Dregs or An Apology to Marco
(The Moving Van Was My Greek Chorus)

The stock of what we left:
A button, the wheel and hose and nozzle, a lie,
the dirt in our treads, a wild side garden,
the holes of the nails, a watch battery,
stove and pipes and cabinetry,
and the dust of our skin, and the sounds of us:
shoe scuffs and creaks we caused,
the skeletons of mice we poisoned catacombed in walls,
the tire swing about to give, the tree we gentled into the earth,
friends, an address, a phone number, him—

Marco, (who didn’t care I couldn’t catch a baseball,
and fed a squirrel named Snickers by hand from his window,
and ate Fritos with cottage cheese on top,
and wept with me when we saw a grandpa die
in a car accident while we were out riding bikes)
I couldn’t tell you we were moving because…

The roll and swell of the highway, the anxious dream quit,
the calming cool of that concrete stoop, the haze of his Camels
and rot odor of our clothes, the tiger purr of his Camaro,
the idea this would finally be our last house,
his reassuring A-frame stance, his Navy moustache,
the way he’d swear down the Doberman who shook my step,
all definitions of permanence and family settling down in my mind—

Marco, do you remember the giant letter A
painted on my garage by the previous family
and how we used to wonder what it meant
like was their name Anderson or Adams
or if it meant something sinister or in code
like Assassins or A-Bomb.
I know now. I learned the word foreshadowing
long after I moved away from you.
And I’m sorry if you knocked unknowing on our door
and peered through the curtainless windows.
I didn’t tell you because I was hurting,
and I wanted to hurt someone back.