Those Days

I remember only its ghostly aftermath; 

my parents' divorce.

My dad was cast without anything,

we lived in a rented renovated barn.

My bed was in the hay loft,

and sometimes it was as if

I was an explorer, climbing a ladder 

to a secret tree house in the jungle,

other times I knew too well

of our poor situation. 

Books sat collecting dust 

in the moving boxes, 

with nowhere to be rested.

An old square TV was propped up

on a construction cart by our kitchen. 

The girl whose mother rented the barn to us 

Was a spoiled rich girl,

Lucy,

younger than me.

She had a pink bedroom 

bigger than my living room.

She made fun of my brown hair,

and ‘freaky gray eyes.’

On my fifth birthday, she gave me one of her old dolls.

It was worn and broken, 

and she gave it to me in a plastic Shaws bag.

I liked it and played with it all the time.

We cut a small tree down every year,

never a real Christmas tree,

and decorated it with 

laminated pictures of Bob Marley 

attached to bent paper clips. 

Those were the early days, the ones I didn't understand, the ones that don't feel like they actually happened. I wonder what Lucy’s up to.