Sometimes we drank the freedom
trail—walked wobbly
on cobblestones,
ducked into tiny bars
to down beers and then look
at centuries old graves.
We stood before rotting
churches and tried to feel new.
Already half hung over
we climbed the 294 steps
of the Bunker Hill monument
and looked down at the city
sweaty and woozy from heat.
We did this for everyone
who visited as if it was tradition
or a game we played all the time.
When I was a teenager,
I jumped over the guard rail
and onto Plymouth Rock
to scrounge people’s wishes
for gas and weed money.
I stood stoned in front
of the Pilgrim Maiden
statue to honor all the women
who died that first winter.
My friend told me
it was actually a woman
who’d committed suicide
because she couldn’t bear
any more of the freezing,
starving months.
One fourth of July,
Megan snuck onto the Mayflower
by doing her bar routine—
flipped over the barricade
and onto the deck of the ship.
I waited on the dock, watching
for the cops. And when she flopped
back onto land, we ran
back to her parent’s mini van
and listened to Galaxie 500
on full blast the entire car ride home:
I wrote a poem on a dog biscuit,
but your dog refused to look at it.
Maybe this is what I want
to reclaim from the wreckage—
These moments when I contemplated
all of that history and purity
and human suffering—
that I day I trespassed
on to the hard stone of it,
and took from it like it owed me.
Bree A. Rolfe writes and teaches in Austin Texas. Her first chapbook Who’s Going to Love the Dying Girl was released in September of 2021 by Unsolicited Press.
Nevermore Journal 