for my generation. Not our malls, but the way we burned    
CDs, passed songs from hand to hand. Has it been so long? 

a friend says as we scroll through first and last  
names on our reunion invitation: a mental parade  

of kindergarten grins, pre-teen braces, chemistry goggles, 
a few blank mysteries. I confess my backward yearning  

for the routine of homeroom and bells—our day broken  
apart with a clear path through the gray zone of it,  

and small free gaps tucked between assignments, 
between subjects. A note-taker, I learned by writing:  

a role I was to inhabit. And yet, memory is tender still  
of that moment wedged on the bleachers trying to smile 

for a photo while also trying not to weep with my belief 
I’d never quite belonged; I didn’t gleam correctly,  

was too interested in obscure tracts, too drawn 
to history’s fogged mirror. I don’t know who laid     

her palm in blessing on the blade of my shoulder that day, 
but I would like to thank her now. Some things we do, 

my brother says, to salute our former selves; he means 
cheap beer in old stomping grounds. But I keep drifting 

back to those tense months after 9/11—muted news 
running in the hallway, and grave discussions in class, 

the sudden comradery with adults who stopped 
pretending they could protect us. There was no point 

in studying—and there was every point: conflicts 
to understand, a changed geopolitical reality to prepare 

for. And, meanwhile, slams of locker doors, the swipe  
and sweep of cafeteria duty, the slow-fast tidal wave 

that was the internet reshaping our lives, arguments 
about waterboarding and war crimes, the FBI, rumors 

about which DMV location offered the easiest in-car 
driving test. We who thumbed messages on flip-phones 

or called home with updates after far away games,  
we live in a world beyond prediction, having survived  

by now plague and insurrection, also recession  
and distraction. What odd fondness I feel for us— 

our shared milk-carton years, our scattering 
from the bus where we sat in pairs and hummed along 

to whatever boomed from the speaker, or we read 
from a shared book, nodding a signal to turn the page.