Zach

18

Citronella

I remember the Catskills as a rusty-red pickup truck roaring through Jeffersonville, a blonde girl perched on its running board. Her fingers clutching metal, screaming. She looked at me, I looked away -- there’s nothing Swayze about it.

At Peck’s, boys with hair like straw smiled at me down the produce aisle with no teeth, threw rocks at pigeons holding sermon outside around
the lamppost, kicked dust in each other’s faces. Watched them spear fish in the creek with sharpened sticks, but not for dinner, always white bread & cold cuts, the occasional dinosaur-shaped chicken nugget. Always cold.

Another girl sits among marigolds in the adjoining lot but does not pluck them, not the way the boys do. Watching the road and its travelers, men with leather tongues who spit out of open car windows, clench teeth that are no longer there.

A girl who only knows love from magazines, who thinks she can fly away from this town of rusted red trucks and the men who drive them, takes my hand and goes over her bruises, the cartography
of her body. She tells me there must be a God because United Baptist was one of the only buildings in town to escape last year’s brushfire; I tell her
this is because the pastor is an arsonist who got bored with burning the crops of former parishioners. She doesn’t like that. I shrug and tell her she needs to learn to let go of these aches. She looks at me
and her eyes say that all she aches for are wings.