flying over Denison Avenue

when i was a little girl
i lived in a huge Victorian mansion,
(with a turret and all)
on Denison Avenue
nowadays they call them Painted Ladies,
Mom and Dad scraped and painted her
all by themselves.
the kitchen was in the basement
complete with a dumb waiter to the main floor,
there were rooms and rooms of ghostly
apparitions, bees & honeycombs inside
one of the upstairs bedroom's walls that we rented out to
Hungarian Freedom Fighters in 1957, my room
had beautiful pale blue butterflies and otherwordly flowers.
out back was what remained
of a stable, the barn had been
renovated to a 2-family with 'the weird' kids living inside.
there were mulberry and cherry trees, raspberry bushes,
a child's wilderness to explore,
little wild mice and felled pigeons for my cat Blackie to play with
until they didn't move any more,
two huge silver pines stood like sentinels in the front yard.
my little brother would dig all the way to China and we'd find all
kinds of treasures, shiny trinkets and colored beads.
it cost 10 cents to ride to St. Boniface on the snowiest days,
there were few fat kids and no neighborhood watches,
the house was torn down years and years ago,
but once in a while, i still dream of jumping from the two story
back porch, (something i never did).

and sometimes i fly.