Stay (I Missed You)
       

Tonight I walked the few blocks down to the river,
where I saw a great blue heron and a child flying
a white kite on the far shore. I saw what Justin calls
space flowers, the green ones, growing beside a picket fence,
and looked them up to discover they're called spurges,
turned that word in my mouth. Up along the river road,

before I came to the intersection where a sedan
was blasting Lisa Loeb's "Stay" at a volume so great
I could make out the music even through sealed windows,
and before I arrived back at my house with the pear trees
and raspberries just beginning to bloom—before all that,

a black car drove by from behind and some guy inside yelled
go back home, you chink bitch. Do I dare admit I wished
I had a baseball bat, wanted to run that car down
and bash it, dent it good? Do I dare say, in fact,
for a moment I wanted to crack that bat across
this white kid's grin? I think he was a kid—no more
than twenty, anyway, and did I even need

to say he was white? What I do need to say is,
truth be told, what I wanted in that instant was no bat
but a gun to fire as they sped past. What I had was
three more blocks to go back home, not to some exotic land
but to the place where I sit with this urge to swing, to hit,

with the question of whether or not, if armed, I would have
missed. Home is the place with the flowering garden,
with the boys shouting from cars, with no bat or gun
in any room, but the Four Horsemen Shooter's Supply
just two short streets away. Home is the place where I think,
hey, I can leave, I can leave, where I choose to stay.

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Copyright © 2022 Jennifer (JP) Perrine All rights reserved
from New Letters
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission