80s Night – Some Hair Metal Song
By Torran Anderson
For Michelle

Fake headbanging hair we don’t have
fingers raised in devils horns, to some song, maybe:

And here I go
again on my own—
going down the only road
I’ve ever known

Ghosts mingle through the lobby
searching for familiar faces and fresh air
just like the rest of us.
“Hey,” she says, squeezing through the crowd,
“we used to ride the school bus together.”

The music flooding out the door,
I can’t quite place her face, and it might have been:

Every rose has its thorn,
just like every night has its dawn,
just like every cowboy sings his sad,
sad song

There aren’t sparkles in our eyes like blue suburban skies
but I remember her sitting in the front of the bus,
with her two brothers, long black hair, walking home swinging her lunch box in circles.
“We had the same bus stop,” I say.

The music is loud and joyfully cheesy, and it could have been:

Love bites, love bleeds
it’s bringin’ me to my knees

The ghosts drift off into the café
to haunt the rotating dessert display
and count the pennies on the floor.
We piece together the random stops of a mutual history,
passing each other by a high school locker, at a gallery exhibit, but there was somewhere
else…
and it doesn’t really matter where we met before
because the song that was playing was definitely:

Heaven isn’t too far away
closer to it every day