by the back door, little pink gumboots

            a wind-chilled nose tip            your accessory

            the tiniest rose nub                  out of place

                       (brown snow slushies, dirty roads)
                       now                  you go clubbing

                       alcohol-pinked cheeks & hot strobe lights

                       push     push     pushing against your body.
                       from houses, street corners, I pick you up

                                    headlight-reflected,   sleep sitting

                                    in your tired smile’s corners:

                                               my brightest stop sign. 
            your seventeenth birthday      & my surprise

            pink vanilla dream cake

            on top a wreath           of tiny sugar roses: 
                       they melt on your warm tongue.          Behind,

                       another year of you       dissolves into

                                    a sunset-pinked October sky 
	and now the photo flat, / laptop screen-entrapped /

                       you look up at me         and I look back

                                    my heart squeezed between 
                       the gap 	of then and now

                       how you            have always been there,

                       little pink gumboots                  tracking muddy footprints

                                               across my own life 
                                    even now, eight hundred kilometres                  apart

                       you sing me home