by Nicholas Bonarski
For years the school bus took the same path
past your grandmother’s house—just uphill from yours
each day the fields flickering past,
sometimes filled with corn,
autumn filled with hay bales
that long swinging arm of the sprinkler
tempting in the summer heat, always running
as we’d drive back to your house
on the way home from town
and one year, many years later
homesick, soul-wandering spied dandelions
growing, a trove near the treeline
and parked near the ditch to sit for a moment
with my thoughts all running rampant
when they turned to you, and childhood
how second grade best friends lived extremes
up and down the hill, across the trampoline
riding top speed on gravel roads
I used to ride my bike to you,
we lived close enough to each other
it was possible for my little body to pedal
itself there and back without exerting
what it can’t spend
what it doesn’t have, maybe still lacks
the dandelions far across the field
yellow bright mirage in the distance
I would walk there now if you’d meet me.
Nicholas Bonarski is a student at Grand Rapids Community College pursuing an undergraduate in Creative Writing. His poems have appeared in The Write Launch and orangepeel literary magazine, with forthcoming poems in the Spring Poetry Reading chapbook. His most recent title All The Things You’ve Never Asked (2023) is an arrangement of personal notes read as poetry. In another life, he supports the Interventional Cardiology staff at the Fred and Lena Meijer Heart Center.
This poem previously appeared in The Write Launch.