Ross White

Aubade with Hair Spray and Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation

I kept one thumbnail long and sharp to slice
through the plastic wrapped around cassettes.
A blue Datsun squealed through the neighborhood
each morning, some haggard court clerk or senate page
riding the brakes. My bike was stolen from the garage
a couple weeks after I blew my savings on it.
One of those seventeen-year broods emerged
and they crunched with every step on the sidewalk.
The Metro breathed heat into the tunnels.
I still had all that hair, those dreams of glam,
denim and studded belts. The tapes in the deck
would shriek like faulty brakes. I worked that summer
with the town cleanup crew, sawing fallen limbs,
trimming hedges, hauling oversized trash, stoves
and dryers, sometimes just counting cars
on Leland Ave. to help the town report on traffic.
Kids like me had nowhere to go: invisible between 
divorces, it wasn’t that we were unloved
so much as figments of a previous life
still haunting the refrigerator and breadbox.
I was that age: too old to play with action figures,
though I still had them piled in a box, too young
to sneak off with high school girls. I’d lied
about my age to work three days a week,
just for something to do. I couldn’t fill the time
fast enough. I listened to music, lit candles, threw rocks,
cut grass, trapped beetles in drinking glasses, ate ramen,
kicked trash cans, ran the hose to watch water
cut paths down the driveway. I dreamt of places
I’d only read about, The Roxy, CBGB, Whisky a Go Go.
This morning, I woke with a shiver. I’d been back there,
stuck in eternal summer in cutoff shorts,
my thin limbs shaking with sweat, Jane’s Addiction 
and Sonic Youth and Skid Row all thrashed
into one long drone like the call of a cicada.
My wife reached over and put her hand on my back,
and a kinder sun streamed in. I wasn’t waiting
anymore. The cat stirred at the foot of the bed,
and I fell back asleep, this time dreamless and mild.

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Ross White is the director of Bull City Press, an independent publisher of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. He is the author of Guilt Ledger, winner of the Wren Poetry Prize; Charm Offensive, winner of the Sexton Prize for Poetry; and three chapbooks: How We Came Upon the Colony, The Polite Society and Valley of Want. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, POETRY, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily and The Southern Review, among others. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Find him on Bluesky: @rosswhite.com