Mandatory Stop (Bus 831)

Of all the prophets, harbingers, and seers

that scrape their voice out from overhead

heralds the intercom of bus 831 

“Brigham Young University, mandatory stop.” 

(I think he is the most honest angel)

I chose to come here myself

trading out jungle grey rivers

for a desert blanketed in spring crocus sidewalk cracks

I chose (as satan despises)

my first roommate was a homestake girl.

Who forgot that we braided knots into each others’ hair 

while girl's camp mothers sewed length to our shorts with cougar-covered t-shirts

(so we could kneel without touching the ground)

I kissed campus through a boy who slid down banisters and

did not come to Provo for the "same reasons as everyone else."

He came of his own accord

(Just like his brothers, and his sisters, and his cousins)

I chose to come here myself 

from a chartered path of a billion points

(a billion branded baseball caps at dinner tables)

A roadmap grid of intersecting gravities 

Tugging hundreds north, and hundreds more west

My first apartment was 3 blocks south 

of the newly-wed house that my grandpa 

painted for my grandma. 

"Is it still there now?" he asks me every summer.

The answer is always "yes,"

"where else would it have gone?"