Page 3 of Wayfarers

Or when you finally turn eighteen in a KOA campsite

in northern Michigan, which you celebrated

with a yellow cake salvaged from a Meijer dumpster that said

in blue frosting, Happy Retirement, Penis!

(I hope you got a corrected cake, Denis, and happy retirement)

and you can suddenly appear back in society

without too many questions and so you go, go in the night

like you did once, go like a ghost, go like a thought

leaving your mind, end your old life

like someone once did for you.

Sylvie Driver’s Seat

Senior year I had superpowers. Drove myself

to piano lessons at the convent before school started,

Sister Lois with her ruler tapping out the tempo

on the baby grand. Or I’d take Winslow for a walk,

a 2.5-mile loop that brought me back to the front door

with enough time to change before I went to zero hour

AP Calc BC with Dr. O. My mom and stepdad were still

in bed sometimes when I’d come back at lunch

to let the dog out. Sometimes I’d come back

to find them blasting Tom Petty, smoking a bowl,

or my mom halfway through making pozole

or something, I’d know first from the garlic husks

and onion skins and chili dust on the hardwood floor

and then the smell, the stew stuck hard to the Le Creuset

and burning and her off on her iPad on the patio.

There’s a kind of listening you learn to do

at the front door. One step inside, and you know everything

from the quality of the silence. If it wasn’t for my mom’s trust fund—

if it wasn’t for the way my mom’s trust fund