What do you call the feeling when
old friends reminisce on your birthday?
And it hits like a racecar of an ache.
Great, heaping wells of it,
and I am a person of one place
inside boundaries of thought, stuck in the humanness of my wrung hands.
Backpack straps dig trenches in my shoulders.
I wonder how I got here;
what I need to do to stay.
And I think of the country club where my parents met,
of my father who moved state-by-state to grow a family in a basement
so I could teach chemistry to people I temporarily named friends,
and be scared about the future.
So I could feel and feel,
and I feel.