For Jesse
Jesse was the youngest boy of thirteen boys and I was the youngest girl of eight one quiet childless 
house groaning between ours as we teemed from the windows and made smears of our fingerprints 
on the glass Jesse had an imaginary friend and it told him to key all the cars on our street pour sugar
into the gas tanks once Jesse stopped a boy from jumping in front of a speeding train by yanking the 
back of his jacket and wrapping him in a bear hug on the ground keeping him pinned there while the 
train roared past and the wind made the strands of their hair dance together right there in the gravel 
Jesse’s eyes were cornflower blue they disappeared inside his face when he laughed and once I stuck 
my finger into the dimple on his cheek because it was the deepest thing I’d ever seen but not deeper 
than the woods they found him in naked in the snow muttering to the sky laughing from an eyeless 
face before they put him in a white coat and locked him away for good Jesse was the first to teach 
me to suck at a wound where it bleeds how to place a mud pie on a bee sting how to avoid getting 
shoved into the mailbox by the bigger kids who never let us play ghost in the graveyard or kick the 
can after dark mine and Jesse’s mother smoked Pal Mal’s in his kitchen used shiny dimes to scratch 
their lotto tickets to a papery pulp