In 1996
Ashley M. Bunton
My neighbor murdered his girlfriend
the whole town sat on pins and needles
undecided news cameras held in the road
captured a story while we skipped rope
I held my club in a stick lean-to on the block
watching adults run up and down the street
quiet sneakers rushing by like us, selling drawings
too quiet, door to door
Ashley M. Bunton wrote poems as she worked as a journalist across a decade from 2010 to 2020. She took the advice of Virginia Woolf: “For heaven’s sake, publish nothing before you are thirty,” and is sharing her poems for the first time now that she’s “in her 30s.”
