The field of skunk cabbage between us
and being heroes.

You told me that you didn't 
see fairies like I saw fairies.
You told me that you shut your eyes and didn't
see anything but black and I told you
that you don't have to close your
eyes to see what you wanted to. 
Do you remember how we played our
own protagonists? Saved ourselves
because there are no savoirs designed
for 6th grade fat girl-bodies and chain-smoking
eleven-year-olds trying to measure
death out of their t-shirts. Do you remember
that we were those children shaken loose from
the orange and red maple leaves
collected in the armpits of the stream--
waded barefoot or wet-socked in the
cold water to the other side of the 
creek where the trees blocked out the balding 
heads of convenience stores and dentists offices.
We crossed the field of skunk cabbage--
Ate leaves like spring rolls or tortillas--
made onion grass voodoo--
And somewhere between the skunk cabbage
and the old limestone temple across the way we 
left our wet socks and our play dough bodies--
shedding childhood like a snake skin--
unpeeled from our freckles like a fruit roll-up.
We didn't have to be anything but patience 
in the thick thighs of fallen birches and 
and sometimes we could be slayers of dark spirits crawling
out of our own wet socks-- out of knee bones
and carved out of the limestone temple walls
where farmers used to burn stone to fertilize
skunk cabbage fields. You told me you didn't see
fairies but that you did see dark spirits--
and I said that we didn't need the creek to see
those-- that we needed the creek to fight those--
fight with twig rapiers, pollen pixie spores,
and hurled dragon's blood we collected in globs from the
gaping syrup sores of the trees--
And you were never just the neighbor boy who I walked
through a creek with-- you were never just early-sundown
night meandered home by each island of street lamp--
you were never just wet June spent making constellations 
out of bug bites-- 
You were the rebuilt bridge of rot-tree limbs
after the hurricane and the flood that
turned off all the lights-- We could be thunder feet
by that creek and you and I and everyone
was something different across a field of 
skunk cabbage-- and I still see fairies and 
I know that you don't need to talk to them like
me. Maybe we had too many dark spirits
waiting for us in our own knees
but I think if I was ever a hero it
might have been waste deep in the creek
across from a field of skunk cabbage-- fat--
thirteen and leaving my child-body skin
on the mashed bones of maple trees
and in the gravestones between each
boisterous head of skunk cabbage.