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"Terminal Street" by Al Maginnes (Published in Taking Up Our Daily Tools, St. Andrews College Press, NC, 1997)

I never meant to leave there or come back 

for fear I'd meet myself on the paint-starved porch 

of one of the unnumbered houses just past 

the spot where the stained sidewalk buckles 

and thins to a crumble of gravel and black dirt. 

That life was always we. Always waiting.

Groups swirled on porches, huddled in living rooms 

to pass joints and dishwasher epiphanies 

hand to hand while we watched for our lives 

to pull up gleaming at the curb. 

Someone new was always crashed on the couch. 

Someone else was always moving out, 

a chair, a mattress, a pillowcase of clothes. 

The drugs we took did not let us sleep 

or forget the university three blocks away 

that most of us had come to town for 

only to escape its towers of windows that would not open 

into jobs we worked just enough 

to pay for real life: pounding light of bars, 

rooms crowded with strangers and smoke, 

the sacrament of lined mirrors, all of us 

bent in our rush to forget where 

we arrived from, how we got here. 

Say it: we were in love with our poverty. 

When we threw the furniture we salvaged from curbs

into our bare front yards, it was proclamation:

we needed nothing. Not the littered rooms we lived in,

the jobs we changed like socks, the paychecks

we could not wait to blow. 

Nothing comes as cheap as memory's high.

A girl whose parents waited in the car

while she gathered her albums, 

kissed everyone goodbye, taped her new address

in Vermont or Colorado to the refrigerator.

She stopped, eyes blurred and shining, to say

"God, I already miss this place," and she was gone.

Each morning the water stain on my ceiling

made the shape of a new continent. 

After every rain, plaster gobs smeared the stairs.

The black dress girls who work in bars,

the boys with the names of their bands

tattooed on their skinny arms

can't cure nostalgia's hangover and don't want to.

They don't want to hear that they'll ever

want to move away. And I'd never tell them

that a part of me I love

still waits on that street, still waits

to score, to catch the smooth ride,

to let the man I have become come back

to explain how and why he left here

and where he found worth going.