One spring Ullu collected all the dead wood
he could find & built a gazebo. The brick backyard
pretended to be grass, all the pictures we took
from the waist-up for our Myspace pages
passing us off as suburban girls worthy of nature.
Our ironed hair, pressed straight down our backs
Claire’s jewelry glinting in the sunlight. It wasn’t long
before we started decorating the gazebo
with fake foliage. Painted leaves stapled to stem,
roses that never wilted. Actual flowers were expensive
& only for funerals. We had too many funerals to waste
flowers. But we loved our story: the gazebo
that dared to live on concrete. The plastic petals.
Always red. Always bright. Never in need of water.