We drank forty ounce high lifes in the dark before taking our clothes off

and running around the municipal green space kept trim for us

 

before a tree-splayed light beam lit the curve of your back and its shadow

on my chest pulsing at the shouting and scattering and rounding up of teens

 

telling lies about our names and addresses because the cops couldn’t really think

we’d tell the truth so they just wrote up our pseudonyms and called us little freaks

 

and you were a little freak but not how they meant and of the fifteen or so

unpixelated memories I still have of you for some reason this one came first

 

when I heard of your death from a text from a friend it wasn’t your justified anger

on prom night in that same park it wasn’t my pulsing fear of your strong step father

 

it wasn’t you at 16 explaining that you couldn’t think of a reason not to be high all day

if how you felt was how you felt all the time it wasn’t the pictures I saw of you

 

so cold smoking a cigarette on a card of cardboard by a train track waiting to run

and run and jump and ride to the next state it wasn’t even the year you thought it was appropriate

 

to wear a single dreadlock jesus christ Mia none of this came to me when I got the text

I always knew I’d get because as you rode around America and we chatted every year or so

 

you stayed that child laughing “fuck the cops” sneaking out to get tattoos

from that guy who graduated a couple years before us who had a gun

 

I mean a real gun and a tattoo one and back in the Arboretum I just can’t think of anyone

like you so yes you are a freak and I am too but not like your singularity no

 

I’m a freak like how the cop meant when he shook his head and wrote my fake name down.