Iain Haley Pollock

  We gunned each other down, gunned each other down in the street, abandoned each other unburied. Later, those left bearing the palls burned to show their love. Burned to light our streets with the dying asterisms of their rage. And we watched until our watching made of them a carnival: He, the twirling fire-spitter.

The Irvine cops picked up Sherod while he was riding Jimmy’s bike to school. He’d snuck up into the scrub, coyote hills above our complex to work on the fort we were building with wood from a deserted rancher’s shack. By the time he came down to the bus stop, we were the diesel exhaust

Fifteen years since Bobby Dougherty died. The night before our last day of school, in his closet, with a belt, he hanged himself. His girlfriend had left him, and he wouldn’t graduate this year—that’s what we chalked it up to. But grades and a girl couldn’t have been all. We should have seen the impulse