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Chestnut Hill		

Wrong stop in an
unfamiliar neighborhood. 
No trains back towards the city.
“Guess we’ll have to walk,”
says Jim.

I squint into the dark
and try to make out the path
of the icy tracks that brought us here.
Jim suggests we take the street and
I put my faith in someone 
whose internal compass is permanently 
spinning out of control.

We walk in a thin valley,
large Victorians jutting out 
of the hills beside us,
testaments to the Old Money
that I suppose used to flow freely
through the streets of suburban Boston.

Jim pulls a bottle of vodka 
from his jacket pocket
and we pass it back and forth
feeling novel, as drunk kids 
trying to find their way 
are probably a rare commodity 
around here.

We eventually stumble upon Woodman Lane,
home to the home of my aunt.
I tell Jim how she
doesn’t get along with some of her neighbors
because her great-great-great-great grandfather
didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence
and her husband’s got that tainted 
New Money that’s been going around.
How she would have been Kathy Bates on the Titanic.

Jim and I probably don’t 
help the situation as
I suddenly get sick and
throw up next to the sidewalk,
on the same lawn that
Jim is creating a yellow patch of snow in.

Jim soothes away any remorse as he 
launches into rehearsed rhetoric 
about the symbolic nature of our actions
against the faceless enemies of “elitism,
wealth, and class division.” 
It’s easy for us to imagine the horror 
of the residents when they came out
to their horse-drawn carriage the next morning
in their tuxedos and Dickensian dresses, 
jaws dropping at the mess we’d made.

At my aunt’s, we brush our teeth together 
in one of the five bathrooms,
splattering toothpaste as we laugh at our deeds 
and the hypocrisy of the rich.
In the hallway, we argue over which 
of the eight doors leads to 
the room where we sleep.

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