The hangout parking lot was in the center of town.
In the parking lot there was a gas station, a car wash and a convenience store.
And the convenience store there was a fried chicken place that doubled as a pizza shop.
In the pizza shop Peggy had one tooth left.
She was chain smoking while making pizza in a hairnet.
She closed the box and said, "Kid, you have no idea with these lips can do to a man in bed. Trust me teeth just get in the way.
I had just enough bite to believe her.
It was my third summer working in the convience store freezer.
I wore a snowsuit in August and smelled like a frostbitten truck full of Budweiser cans.
But I knew love at noon every Sunday, when I took the locks off the beer case.
Even the preacher came straight from church to call me an angel.
I listened to the bells on the door and stole more than enough bottles for myself to understand everyone's chest is a living room wall with awkwardly placed photographs hiding fish shaped holes.
I was seventeen years old, my boyfriend was a butcher at the IGA.
My body was a hotel safe I didn't trust.
My bedroom window was so close to the ocean.
Everyone I knew had salt in their wounds and a rifle in their truck.
I carried most of what was shot in my tear ducts but where I come from you never let what you carry fall.
You carry your grandmother's laundry to the clothesline where she will teach you, always hang your underwear between the towels and the blankets.
My grandmother had a Bible, a root cellar and an ashtray on every table.
My mother had a sweater from JCPenney on layaway.
My cousins had trouble with the cops until the day they left for Iraq.
And I had a heartbeat that sounded like a good old boy taking a baseball bat to a mailbox.
Like a mill worker on the picket line talking about the size of the trout his daughter caught.
Like my father smoking a Marlboro red after while cutting the grass after a 12 hour day.
That is always what I think of when I think of class, his blue collar against his redneck.
You know where that word comes from, right?
The sun beating against his back.
And come every Sunday. When that collection plate found it's way to my families lap they would fill it with every dollar they didn't have.
While I stared at the light in their stained glass.
Not knowing someday I would spend these Sundays with people who talk radical art and politics.
While making no mention of the amount of privilege it takes to have the option to not shop at Wal-Mart.
To have the option to not fight a war, when there isn't a job in your town that will heat your home.
All winter my father put wood on the stove he built with his own hands.
My neighbours caught their dinners in their ice fishing huts.
I knew nothing about the poem in my mouth except to say I want to go home.
To where Peggy's punching the time clock.
Like someday she might actually knock it out.
To that field beside my house with the strawberry patch and the lightning bugs and the bumblebees.
My uncle had a Sears tv with 11 channels.
My aunt was the hot lunch lady and even in school none of us never talked about degrees,
Unless we were talking about what the weather was.
Honestly it's been a long, long time since I've been warm enough.