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

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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.”