The Gilded Age

we shrugged. every time we brought up the stories.

at all the dinner tables and bus drives where we told strangers

of olden days and that came when we played in auric leaves

and threw them at the neighbor boy instead of scooping them into his yard.

where my mother replaced my plastic humvee six weeks after

i totaled it running brother down (he had broken my yellow crayon)

she apologized it took so long; i ran past the emptied change jar that Monday.

i didn’t count the number of times the office with the crimson droplet sign was entered

because of electric bulletins flashed the sidewalks; they were mechanical aurora borealis,

my father’s latest bandaid ignored for the one eyed rat atop the torn up Fedex box.

i saw none of the pulled out classified sections as those Saturdays

we dug with dollar store pails at the state park hoping to find gold.

all i thought about was instead about scratching billy in 4th grade

for laughing at the penny-sized hole in my left shoe.

i never knew we painted gray pavement over our childhood’ scarred fissures,

covering the cracks, like the towel did over our shattered window,

Over, and Over, until they were gone.