Four Poems

GIRL GAMES

There’s a dark mirror in a girl’s gaze
that opens into magic
where anything is possible.
You can only enter
if you’re a girl
and only in the daydream jump
rope years, only in the handclap
games in the yard by a clothesline
singing together, striking
spit palms, sunlight
blown through hair. Once you’ve left,
you can never go back.

And there we were, us girls
in the dirt yard, barefoot, imagining
a world. We were hand in hand
in the power. We conjured it
jumping rope striking the dust
and listening to mockingbirds,
saying, Pretend you’re—
and Pretend I’m—and now
I wear the crown of antlers
and Quick! Quick! Into the woods.
And our magic was real. We conjured
each other into planes no one
thought possible. No one but us
because we knew the black
eye of the robin
we could enter.

On the porch steps with a comb,
we made furrows in each other’s
hair, exquisite parts
down the center,
weaving damp strands
between our fingers. Braiding,
we entered a liminal space.

We gathered in a circle
in the cool darkness
of a room, someone lit
her mother’s candles and we saw
our faces flickering.
We brushed back her hair as she lay
on the floor, drumming on her
temples with warm fingertips,
following the lead girl
in a chant. Cross-
legged on the floor,
we laid our hands on the girl,
we incanted, we believed.
And we were only magic together
and only because we believed.
We each of us had to enter the burning
rope of belief. With two fingers
we rose her into the air.
She rose higher into the dark as we
sang. She rose higher
until she hovered, hair hanging,
rose higher and she was level
with our shoulders and then floating
just below the ceiling fan
whose rickety rhythm
rendered our senses into the spirit
world where we fell
through a hole into stars.

Later we went to bed with strange new
powers that would be our secret.
Having stepped through the ring of girls
and into some deeper waters
of mystery—
well, I can’t say any more
because the rest is unspeakable.

***

GIRLS & HORSES

Holt, Alabama—
the name always sounded like something’d been torn
off by a tornado
or like grabbing the reins of a runaway colt,
Grab ’holt of that horse.
In Holt we rented a little house with a chain-link fence.
In Holt I heard screeching tires
and we ran outside thinking it was a wreck
but it was two rednecks
in a fist fight in the middle of the highway
and everyone came out of their houses
to watch. We lived with our single mom,
me and my little sister, near the antique store
with finger-chopper metal fans from the ’40s
and these horses, these beautiful plastic
horses with waving manes, galloping
in place. I couldn’t afford them
but I reached for them up on the dusty shelf
and in my mind made them run
with mud spitting from thunderous hooves.
We lived next door to Wendy’s house
below a hillside of scrap metal junkyard
with old trucks and refrigerators and washing machines
and a broken pinball machine that didn’t have any legs
with the top glass busted out
but we could play on it still. Most days
after school we went to Wendy’s house
to play Nintendo with her older sister, who was quiet,
and her brother Thumper
whose real name no one seemed to remember.
Their house began as a single-wide trailer
then was fused into a double-wide that no one entered
except their uncle, a truck driver
who stayed there sometimes.
The five of us kids were playing Super Mario Bros 3
when I got up to go to the bathroom.
“You can’t go in there,” Thumper said.
“My uncle always goes in there after work
and jacks off in front of the bathroom mirror.”
Even Wendy, who was seven like my sister,
knew what it meant. But we didn’t
so of course we were curious when Thumper asked
do we want to see. There was a little hole
in the laundry room wall. I only remember
a faucet running hot steam and pushing
against other kids in the dark to have a look.
Their mother was always in the kitchen smoking
and watching out the window
or making grilled cheese sandwiches
with government white bread and that thin
square cheese wrapped in plastic, which they had
for dinner every single night. But my god
they were good the way Wendy’s mother fried them up
on the griddle while her cigarette smoke drifted
from her face, mixed with grease smoke
and folded into the frilly floral curtains above
the window where you could see the road.
We grew up poor, but never smelled poor
and that, I came to understand, is the difference
between being poor and dirt poor.
It’s the difference
between paycheck-to-paycheck poor
and poverty.
The difference between swimming upstream
against rough rocks, going under, kicking, coming up
for breath—
and being underwater
seeing your mother’s face with her eyes open
bubbles coming out of her mouth
and hair drifting all around her.
Once when Wendy’s uncle was away
we ventured into the dark double-wide.
We entered through a plywood door,
it was damp dark and 15 degrees colder
without heat or electricity.
We played in the sunken living room
with the stained baby-blue carpet
smelling like old cigarettes and spilled beer,
the rust-orange velour couch with autumnal scene
felt sticky and unclean beneath bare feet. We played
on her father’s crutches from after his car wreck,
turned them into stilts and saw who could make it
across the living room like a minefield
without stepping in the dried-up dog shit
from her uncle’s chihuahua before he sold it.

We played every day with Wendy and her sister,
who must have been twelve, older than me
by three years, but quiet and paler
than Wendy who played in the sun
and had freckles strewn across her face.
I was sweeping the sidewalk
out front of our house and her sister came by
to watch me. She said, “I got something to tell
but you have to promise not to say anything.”
She wouldn’t say it outside, so we crawled
into my mother’s golden Honda, over the backseat
and into the way back. I remember
staring at the rear defogger lines on the back
window as she told me her uncle
raped her when he was in town.
In the back of my mother’s car, it felt like we
were in a snow globe and the pieces of her life
were floating all around us.
I remember telling my mother in the quiet
of her kitchen. “What are you going to do?”
I said. I don’t remember what she said,
what she did or didn’t do. I don’t even remember
Wendy’s sister’s name, just that I didn’t see her much
after that. That was the year I started horseback
riding lessons after school.
I was waiting for my mother, she was working late,
and while I was reading on the bleachers,
I saw some trainers bring a stallion
over to a mare who was tied
with her halter and led inside a horse trailer.
They brought the stallion and she fought
but there were four strong men to hold her
in place.
After you hear horses scream,
girlhood is never quite the same
and hoof prints in dirt will always make you think
of the smell of blood and dreams breaking away.
And one chilly autumn morning
my mother found Wendy asleep in her pink windbreaker
curled in a used truck tire
by the side of their gravel driveway near the road.
She woke her up and walked her back home.

***

A WOMAN ALONE IN THE WOODS

A woman alone in the woods
as chestnut trees give way to beeches
blushed with October’s umber turning red.
No understory in this forest.
The woman left her two children
at home with the blue pillows and patterned bowls,
brooms, cupboards and cobwebs
and quilts to keep them safe.
She roams the darkening woods,
only the sound of her footsteps through fallen
leaves, wet broken fern in her hair
smelling of earth. She came to savor
the last of the evening light,
blue mountains rising before her in the west.
It’s getting darker much faster, earlier now.
Through blackening silhouettes of oaks
jeweled light enters as through a stained
glass window. A split open persimmon.
There’s no crickets here. She listens.
No frogs calling, no birds. Not even squirrels.
It’s quiet as moth wings up here
where the stalled ski lift gondolas swing
and moan in wind. A woman alone in the woods listens
for the heavy tromping between the trees:—
wild boar or men?
A woman alone in the woods
listens, picks up a stone, listens
to the hammering heart-tongue-throat
inside the scented animal that she is.

***

FIRST ORGASM AFTER THE ELECTION

What if female orgasm is God
in the round wide world
her quivering swallows all
life milky wave a rip tide
catches the world’s little soldiers
all tiny guns tin tanks
little flags at checkpoints
borderlands melting in her heat
millennium of male-
made laws & reign & all
swallowed in the thunder
of her pleasure it’s raining
women coming a monsoon
drowning puny words of
president this or that
stupid war drum of a mouth
she comes in waves of dark
open mouth of night
sky she swallows all
the surveillance lights
a woman’s orgasm is never lost
it is dark matter
the feminine unfurling
a flame to survive