Marissa McNamara
There Was Now
Before that I was on the other end
of a busy signal, in front
of a red light changing
to yellow. And before that I had a friend
who became a story
that never ended. She’d say,
“To make a long story short,” only
by then it wasn’t. Once,
there were bees
in my bedroom wall behind
the sheetrock. They came in
through the vents.
I swatted their wings
from my hair, tangled.
Before that were my legs
in boys’ cars. One boy left
a misspelled penciled apology
and blue roses on my porch,
and there was a garbage man
who took them away
still in the vase. But I did not rake
the leaves in my yard for him
to take too. They had worked so hard
to fall together.