by Shane Allison
Hanging Loose Magazine 118
In my dream we are two best friends
Lying on our bellies reading comic books
strewn across your bedroom floor.
The sugar rush from the wad of Big League gum
we’re chewing is assurance that we’ll be up all night reading
The Fantastic Four, Captain America, and Superman
back when they were seventy-five cents.
We hang loose at your parents’ house
because my mother is afraid we’ll break something,
that we’ll track in dirt from playing outside.
She offers us Cheetos and Capri Suns to stay away.
Our friendship is impenetrable like a GI Joe tank.
Nothing can break us after the pinky swears
and blood oaths we take using the pocket knife
stolen from my dad’s glove box.
We go around collecting worms in jelly jars,
burning ants under magnifying glass.
When the black neighborhood kids ask,
Why are you always hanging out with that white boy?
I tell them to shut up and hold them in headlocks
until they say sorry.
I am the biggest kid in school
like The Thing from The Fantastic Four.
Mother would never let him in the house.
I had this dream where we were kids with superpowers,
who could fly over buildings,
shoot red beams out of our eyes
and bend crowbars like licorice ropes.
I wish I had grown up with you
in Tallahassee or Kettering, Ohio.
I could have used a friend like you.
