Audrey and Napoleon

.

When Audrey and I were little girls,
one with long legs and one with brown skin,
we would smear summer plums on our mouths
and crush walnuts with her father's baseball
signed by Tug McGraw.  
           As we sat on the sunburned
           rooftops of suburbia and she showed
           me where her kneecap had a cross-stich of
           purple cuts from her first try with a pink plastic razor,
           I lied about my first kiss; she knew
           and let me talk of greater things.  
           That used to make me love her,
           but it doesn't anymore.

I was thinking about Audrey and her chickens last night.
One year, when we both had boyfriends, but still had
sleepovers and compared the sizes of our breasts-
we stood in the mud of the chicken run, and watched
the hens break the necks of yellow feathered chicks.
It must really mean something when a mama goes
mad just staring at her baby who has nothing but dirt
stuck to its back.
           I know I asked her why they did that;
           she said "be careful, a heart is only good for you
           on the inside."

Audrey had a pig, big and pink and black,
with a belly like a bagpipe, and breath you could smell through
the bedroom windows.  We put that pig in the back of my truck and
drove him two hours outside of town;
then we snuck him behind the sighing fence of a farm.  
          I think about her pig sometimes too.
          The way he sat on the earth with his chin in his hands.  
          In all the ways I remembered it then,
          he always seemed like it was just the right fit,
          that brave new land.  
          Now I wonder, though, how long he just lay there,
          head in his hands,
          waiting for us to take him back home.