POEM OF THE MONTH
April
FRIENDSHIP
Before Returning to Earth by Derek Mueller
Your Laugh Ripples the Wind
We are eight, still looping bicycle chains—
lassoing days, setting them loose.
Not to say we're invincible,
but I’ve seen you play GoldenEye,
never once watched you die—
jumping car to car on an armored train.
Never seen you fall on inline skates,
skimming the curb outside Burger King,
Whopper in hand,
half-moon bite suspended midair.
We aren’t thirty-five. There was no accident.
Your back is still new, still elastic.
No one found you in the attic,
pockets lined with loose change.
We never had enough for another pack of cards,
but the corner store knew our faces—
the Griffeys, the Ripkens, the lesser-known names
fanned before us.
Like your face in today’s local news—
a clip my father sends.
He must have you confused
with someone else.
Another name swallowed by an epidemic.
I’m still wading in the shallow end,
turning as you yell at me to watch—
pumping the diving board, impossibly cool.
And then you take to the air, weightless,
suspended,
there—
then gone.
The board still trembling, waiting for you
to climb back up.
Greg Hughes is an emerging writer and nonprofit marketing consultant based in Redondo Beach, California. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle and Diceroll. He holds a BFA in Dramatic Writing from the Conservatory of Theatre Arts at SUNY Purchase and is currently studying poetry in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program.
This poem began with a few fragments—childhood memories, especially the ones I shared with the boys I grew up with. My memory of that time, while marked by the usual awkwardness and occasional hopelessness of being young, is threaded with tenderness: playing GoldenEye for hours, breathing on N64 cartridges to revive them, believing we were skilled skaters like the kids in Brink!, and annihilating Whopper after Whopper.
In recent years, most of my contact with those childhood friends has come through brief updates from family back east—a mention in passing, a news article about an arrest, or, most heartbreakingly, news of an untimely death. I think often about those fragments, about how friendship lingers in time. I don’t write to romanticize the “good old days,” but to stake a sign in the soft ground of shared beauty, as if to say: we were here.
Greg Hughes’ “Your Laugh Ripples the Wind” hit me in that soft, breakable place where memory and grief blur into one. I love how this poem feels like both a love letter and a quiet elegy for a friendship suspended in time. Hughes captures the pure, cinematic weight of boyhood: “Never seen you fall on inline skates, / skimming the curb outside Burger King, / Whopper in hand, / half-moon bite suspended midair.” God, what a line — both specific and universal, a perfect image of invincibility we all secretly believed in at eight years old.
I’m struck by how the poem holds space for what was and what isn’t — weaving the bright certainty of childhood into the dissonant reality of loss. The restrained tenderness with which Hughes writes (“Your back is still new, still elastic”) makes the slow ache of the ending almost unbearable: the diving board still trembling, still waiting. There’s nothing overwrought here, no melodrama. Just the devastating ordinariness of how easily the past can slip from our hands, and the pain and beauty of remembering.
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