the skeleton dreamer

Cream-Colored Camaro

The first body was nothing to us:

a shock-glance at that front-page picture,

a blonde girl smiling through the glint of her braces,

then our eyes away to other sections of the paper,

the comics, the arts, away from the story of a girl

hacked up, encased in concrete

and scattered at the bottom of the city lake.

(What is, after all, another girl murder?)

Then, weeks later, found in the ditch:

girl sexed, girl strangled from St. Catherines, minutes away,

and a car connected to both bodies:

Cream-Colored Camaro.

And they were suddenly in so many driveways:

wicked, pale suspects down the street.

We broke their windshields with rocks

from our mothers' gardens;

left notes wrapped around antennas

written in block letters

WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE

the paper ripped from our English notebooks

and flapping in the wind.

It was fair game: we could feel

those cars rolling past us on the highway,

exhaust curling behind our sneakered feet

as we quick-walked home from dance class.

But tucked in our houses after dark,

our brothers taught us how to punch

(thumb outside, horizontal wrist);

they slipped knives into our jacket pockets,

showed us how to hold our house keys

in-between second and third knucklebone,

and where to stab. So we sneaked out of ballet,

and walked like boys at sunset:

legs spread, heavy gait, hunched over, hatted.

Our coats were bulky enough to hide in

and stomp down Guelph Line, down Fairview,

fingering those serrated, dull blades

cupped and sweating in our pockets,

free, incredulous, terrified.