Our Front Yard, Fifteen Years Ago

By Faith Earl

These were the days of IV picc lines in the kitchen
and seizures in the bathroom, of rashes like pink moss
on your breasts and skin that hung from your bones like flags in no wind.

These were the days of cereal for dinner, of limbs like lead
and nausea that could bring a god to his knees.

The unfair exchange of clean blood for disease pumped into
you like gasoline as though you had asked for it; as though it
had already stuffed your twenty into its pocket.

What did I know of an illness that couldn’t be cured
with grape Dimetapp and a day home from school?
What did I know of sharpness like a tick’s teeth?

Even on these days, you would sit it in all that tall grass with me
lifting rocks, naming the weeds, looking for salamanders.