Under the Trailer
A Petrichor Poem
Out at the end of a road
past where they stopped caring
we lived in a single-wide.
Southwest of San Antonio
where loamy soil
and horizon glare
stabilized your bearings.
Junction star route.
Auto shop propped up the base of the hill
before the trailers began.
Hank and Nellie adjacent
to the scrap yard
where we’d play for hours
in the sun
before you weren’t supposed
to let your kids roam free.
Over the fence next door
were two boys.
Tommy and Heath.
They were good for shoves
between my shoulders
as we walked downhill
to the bus stop.
Tommy was on the basketball team.
I would stand and listen at the fence
wondering if they were outside.
Had to pass them to hit the hill
up into the park.
Past the lone house squatting
like a nubby mole on smooth neck skin.
Past expired farmland with a lean-to barn.
Old bags of concrete hardened from summer rain.
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The sun stood in the middle
of the road.
From the bottom to the top.
When it flattened out
I could see her plot.
Pressed under a naggy oak
against folded agricultural fencing.
Angel lived here.
She was the movie girl.
She wore dresses
smiled when she talked
confident in her manner
a couple of years older
shoulder-length blonde hair
always clean-smelling.
We would sit under the trailer and play.
We’d make maps with sticks in the dirt.
Using beercans as structures
and my pockets full of Matchbox cars
we’d imagine high-speed getaways.
Her mom would drop pops and chips
on the unattached steps and we’d sit
and chatter about the lines in the sky
and making smoke bombs out of old concrete.
She stood in the corner of the gymnasium
as I played the Wizard from Oz
mouthing my lines as she clasped her hands.
We’d chuck rocks at the old cars in the scrap yard
until I broke a window.
We never stopped running all the way up the hill
and back to her place.
Giggling past the boys’ fence.
Sun would set under that trailer
and one day she put a kiss on my cheek.
I sat on a cinder block staring back.
She said she had to go.
Sliding sideways under the skirting
she left me sitting there.
I missed supper that night.
Weaving as I walked home.
I knew she was hiding under that trailer.
Her dad had been out of work
and took his days out on her.
Life was hard for a kid in the park.
It wasn’t long and that trailer was empty.
Looked like most others.
But not inhabited.
A new school year kicked off for her.
I never saw her again.
The way I remember her.
Dresses and snacks and smiles and summer.
Licking spear grass and chucking rocks.
That was when I stopped being a kid.
Loss levels you up in ways.
All I had was her school picture.
And sunsets under the trailer.
