Amy Small-McKinney: Neighborhood

I didn’t imagine Stevie who built forts with clay and plugs 
Would die from heroin.
Anyway, that’s not my story.
Though I called his mother every month before her death.
I didn’t imagine Arlene’s mother hit her.  
Arlene’s mother let me stay for dinner.  
Anyway, that’s not my story.
They didn’t live in my house, my house second from the end.
That’s not my story either.  
It belongs to another girl I vaguely recall though lately 
she shoves open my shutters, yells for me to come in for lunch.
I don’t know where I live anymore.  
No one was who I thought they were.  
In my imagination a song is playing, and I am dancing with Anna.  
Anna is the story, and she doesn’t know it.  
What do I know? 
Anna with red wings that opened for me and hovered over the houses of bullies.  
She is dead now too.  I cannot ask.  
Now sadness lives inside, I don’t recognize it. 
I have become its house.

Copyright 2022 Amy Small-McKinney. First published in Verse-Virtual. Included in Vox Populi by permission of the author.

Amy Small-McKinney poetry collections include Walking Toward Cranes which won the Kithara Book Prize (Glass Lyre Press, 2016). She lives in Philadelphia.