Lauren Tivey         St. Augustine      (Carolina Hospital)
Drift Velocity

It was in the afternoons before parents
arrived home from work, that free time
between bus drops and streetlamps
and homework, when we rode Big Wheels

with banana-seat bicycles, multicolored
plastic streamers quivering from our
tufted handlebars, playing cards fastened
to spokes with clothespins, a rhythmic

thwock-thwock-thwock echoing up and down
neighborhood streets, our yells and yawps
bouncing off the faces of split-level homes.
Us savages of suburbia, on the move, liberated,

loosed upon the modest cul-de-sacs of conformity,
the sprinklered lawns of the planet, from backyard
sheds to fetid ponds to broken-glass fields to infinity,
through archipelagos of stars, delinquent constellations,
​
us space cadets with our skinned knees, hair of twigs,
and Kool-Aid moustaches, we roamed, we roamed,
in the orphan twilight, flung by the winds, by
devious escapades, for the amusement of gods.

And then the call for supper, our mothers’ voices
reedy in the dusky air, macaroni and cheese
steaming in avocado kitchens, cartoons squawking
from television consoles, and this is how we lived

our strewn-about days, partially ungoverned
in the anarchy of afternoons, and we pretended
obedience, but our heads were full of interstellar
madness, and our hearts were full of wild grace.

from her manuscript Gen X Primer
​