I

As children we sat in the back of our Volkswagen sedan

     and snickered at air pockets of forced flatus, winged our 

           arms up-and-down, like chicken wings, against our opposite 

              hands, deftly cupped beneath young naked pits– turbulence of 

                artificial gas driving us to the routine of Saturday morning games. 

II

Before my first date, you left Old Spice on my bathroom

    counter– unearthed it from a box of his personals that you

        must have kept, for now, over five dusty years–intergenerational 

            rite of passage, the grave of his skin to mine, your love from his love

                to my first love, turning my head the wrong way for both our first kiss.

III

When I came home urgently from college when you

      called, an urgent calm, I gave you to the doctor, who left me

           to lean wide-eyed in low lit hallways while he touched deep nodes

               beneath your now, licorice arms. The haste of it all– your unhealth 

                     to hospital bed to the heinous foreignness of  just a few more months.