bears in the fox valley

on your birthday we smoked roll ups on your front steps. the late august crescent moon dipped below the terrace house horizon, the streetlights still orange. your dog slept in the grass while we breathed fire and smoke into the midnight like we were seventeen again, not twenty-three. the next night, outside the petrol station, your voice never broke as you broke up on the phone. the cars and trucks flew past us in the lay by, down the kinda lonely carriage ways and the neon signs lit up petrol prices like sickly un-natural night light. you searched through your bag for a lighter in the dark, searching for something you knew you could find, unlike the solution to your three years. take enough left turns and you wind up in the same place. time for us babes to take a right.