the last summer i was a girl 

we climbed the breezy hills of valley forge
that last summer i was a girl.
our july clung to our skin,
humid & saturated. we took your car 
because i crashed mine three weeks earlier.
my head still rattled from the collision. 
the sun was setting & it painted us
with orange light. i can't remember 
what we talked about, but isn't that always 
how memory works? it is rare to recall
exactly what words someone else gave you.
i remember your short hair 
& my short hair. i remember your black vans 
& my black chuck taylors & the songs you played
on the radio as we drove over. 
valley forge was quiet. too hot for tourism
& runners & maybe even too hot for the deer.
the grass grew taller & taller around us
until it became brittle brown hair.
the ghost of all our hair
summoned to the rolling fields
set asside to remember where men slept 
during the revolution's sharp winter.
those men would envy us
with our swathes of bare skin
& the sweat forming at our hairlines. 
did they consider the lives of girls?
i don't mean in the way 
men always think of girls:
with their teeth made of wood & hunger.
i mean could they fathom
what a girl might do 
standing on a hillside
hundreds of years after their deaths. 
all their bones shimmer 
like earrings. all their teeth 
fell out as corn kernels 
to plant the nearby fields. none of them 
had feet like ours. a crumpled piece of metal
spat me out. your backpack was stuffed 
with books you would not read.
instead, we would keep walking
over hill after hill.
we encountered no one. 
or maybe that is how i want to remember it.
regardless, we were the only bodies
in the whole world 
& the sun played the fife for us
as it climbed into its shoe box
on the other side of the hills. 
you drove us home in the dark.