My Shortcut
the summer I was ten the teenage boys next door
stole my panties from the clothesline
my mother knew it was them
their dirty car with their blistering dirty music
they skinny-dipped with girls in their pool
while their parents were on vacation
I heard splashes once in the middle of the night
and peaked from my window to see
their slick dolphin bodies their patches of hair
as they took turns doing cannonballs diving
that September the boys’ father
wouldn’t let me cut through his yard anymore
which was my shortcut to school
rabbits had come to take a bite out of each of his tomatoes
but he blamed the neighborhood kids
though we all hated vegetables
and would never have bent to his lattice to chomp
on warm beefsteaks which hung on the vine
go around he snapped aiming his hose at us
I want my underpants back
I wanted to say but didn’t
instead I wondered about what kind of rabbit
or gopher or groundhog would be so fussy or curious
as to sample each tomato and move on to the next
the way a kid might take a bite from each chocolate
in a fancy box to see what kind of filling was inside
it would take Anne Marie and Donna and Annette and me
a good ten minutes longer to get to fifth grade
since we had to walk on sidewalks now
and wait for traffic guards to get us across streets
one morning the teenage brothers pulled up
turning down their Jimi Hendrix cassette
the brother who was driving said hop in we’ll give you a ride
I was tempted by the cracked leather back seat
with orange foam swelling through
our old man’s crazy the other brother said
he’s obsessed with his garden I’d never really talked
to teenagers before except for my cousins who were forced
to play board games with me at Christmas
I felt serious grown-up as I reached
for the loose rusty door handle
the fake air-freshener smell covering up something bad
at first when Anne Marie called to me
I pretended not to hear her
or her first-grade sister loping behind
but then Pam smiled flashing me her missing tooth
it was the same blank space on the clothesline
where my panties had been drying that summer afternoon
my mother’s white briefs on either side
the boys laughed sucker and sped off
(Appeared in Conclave Issue 1: 2008)