1 minute read
Jamie Crepeau
Just Play Basketball
If you have a friend who burns imagination at the stake, do not speak with wide eyes and shooting stars in your tongue about mentally forged monsters and magic spells. Spare yourself from the manufactured shame of barbed hyena cackling and return to the flat driveway, keep those stories and games as lighthouses in your cerebral trenches while bouncing a hollow rubber sphere until sunset elongates your shadows like an unrolled extension cord. Wait a few more weeks to see cardboard signs and wooden tables fill their yard, covered by toys with barely a scratch in their plastic or paint. Some of them are still in their boxes.
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Jamie Crepeau
Beach Rocks
Thrusting their dark, jagged edges upward, an irregular saw blade cutting noon blue into rough crystals harvesting laughter from parents with children running up across shallow waves to sharpen their first crawl stroke beside minnows and seaweed before one chocolate drop dares an escape down the corner of a lip. Today, there are no offices.
Jamie Crepeau
Riley, Who Was Small
–after John Surowiecki
It was our running joke that you could carry her in the pocket of your coat. She was more acrobatic than a flying squirrel, running and flipping her way from one end of a stage to the other, her slight body muscled like a brilliant mare. She rocked a purple bikini with more confidence than a window mannequin in New York City. She spoke as warmly as notes played on a flute, always listening when I talked about my poetry and drawings, her long blonde hair swaying in the breeze like the branches of a birch tree. One semester later she vanished, moved away faster than a roadrunner, her last name faded away long before social media sites wrapped their tentacles around every household and college campus. Maybe if she was a little more like a koala bear, sunning herself in the same eucalyptus tree, she and I could have eventually had Sunday mornings together to do nothing but clasp our fingers together under the folds of the same bed sheet.
