On Outgrowing Peppertrees By Frances Amiama I When you walk into the field just behind your house with the neighbor’s children, keep quiet. Walk slowly. Find the burnt out body of a car and mourn for its side view mirrors, found whole by the older boys and their wooden baseball bats. Avert your eyes, avoid staring at the plastic bag in the passenger seat, breaking down around the naked bodies of sad eyed women, a twelve month subscription to Playboy, this is where you will come to keep your ghosts. II They will implement new policies to try to teach you that distance traveled on school buses will build up your bones, like milk in plastic cartons. So when you walk up to the Puerto-Rican boy who backhanded a girl you sat behind every day for a year. You will hit him
his skin accept yours like it was waiting for this. You will hit him because he is your size and has restless hands like your father. III In your cluttered kitchen, you will wait for spices to settle into meat, you will hold knives between faintly nicotine stained fingers. You will take comfort in knowing that you rent a house smaller than its backyard. When you wander out the back door and stumble into the small cave of pines, you do not let these trees poke your sides like before, but watch as they entangle themselves on the dark inked patterns of your arms.
without hurting your small tendons. You will hit him and feel
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