This is really quite good.
As far as suggestions go, you need to fix up your meter, and I would bring back 'There, the golden windows, the goddamn golden windows.' as a refrain (but one that hold different meaning by the end of the poem).
In terms of meter, I'd adjust as follows (bold shows main alterations):
"Honeyleaf and Gander"
Third grade
: Year that my mother lost her mother,
Two best friends decided they'd rather be a duo.
I
: remainder of an unfair equation,
ran away through soccer fields at recess,
down and ditched alongside a chain-link fence.
I felt the bite of fresh betrayal,
a mocking sing-song grown stale:
sticks and stones, sticks and stones
(Here it'd be good if you could turn the nursery rhyme against itself, by subverting the last line).Then, the golden windows,
the goddamn golden windows.During Mass on Wednesday,
I found fairies in the chandeliers.
Every evening, my mother and I
went walking up Honeyleaf to Gander,
and our house sat facing west,
high enough to see the lights
of downtown that glowed more
real than the garden of Eden.
There, the golden windows,
the goddamn golden windows.
His home washed now with gray,
and made of
(2 syllable adjective) timber.
Warily
built a bridge of stones too large to skip.
But that summer flooded the creekbed,
so instead he laid
him down,
alone in tall blue grass,
hiding
(3 syllable adverb).
Thinking about snakes.
and a highway median in Ohio
filled with discarded soda cans,
where he once saw Girl Scouts
picking up cigarette butts.
I spent a night once in an
aquarium, instead of stars there
were schools of fish
swimming in memorized circuits
lit with blue, all subdued
,and ghostlike
, I stayed awake.
(I know that changes the meaning of the verse a bit, making it the narrator, not the fish who is ghostlike, but I think it works better)Distantly back home
the headligh
t cars would travel
from one end of my bedroom
to the other,
then disappear.
On two separate hills dissimilar,
we each raced bikes straight down
the yellow center lines,
swearing we'd never gone faster.
We braked too late.
Tumbled headfirst into the overgrowth
of a cul de sac and we've been picking
thorns out of our flesh ever since.
Just my suggestions, up to you.
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