Poetry

Interlude

It always ends before it begins or so it seems. I skirt the edges of summer’s potential in search of higher ground while the girls plunge beneath the surface. They swim through sunny afternoons, slick limbs and sweaty palms sticking to the belly of the month. I spend twenty-seven days begging June to love me and three facing the wall. It scrunches me up in its fist and throws long over the head of July. There is always at least one part of this body that aches, at least one side of this heart sucking in so that it fits; recently, I have been spilling over. Bloody and ugly and desperate; you are still scrubbing your side of the street, and I am still sorry for the mess. That’s the thing about summer. It shines a light through the cracks in the curb until you crawl out of them — I am no longer someone else’s to clean up. I press my mouth to the lip of the year and tilt my head back; there is nothing left to do but swallow the days down in thick, oval gulps in search of a dawn to slip into. Perhaps by August, I will have found a new way to sit in the middle of things, incomplete and jagged, without ripping holes and falling through them.

clb

California girls!

August is bleached and freckled, flung over the front porch railing on Evert’s Street. Liv cracks four eggs into a pan and the birthday cards are on the bar cart. We have big and important things to tell each other now that we have grown into our mouths, and our minds, and our meaning; I tell her I am better because I want to be. We cycle through the neighbourhood past dark. She lends me a light for the back of my bike and yells every few minutes so she knows I am still behind her. We have spent the last five years a little like this; taking turns up front, always finding our way back home. Down by the bay, we are drunk on laughter and the hurt dilutes in the water. Somehow, we are eighteen and twenty-one and twenty-four. Even when the seasons trade themselves in and the years pull us in different directions, we will always be girls wringing moments from the months so we have something to point at — look! Look at the lives we have lived and the Augusts we have left ourselves in — we were here!

We were here.

We were here

clb

notes on girlhood

i slip into november because i have nowhere else to go. winter meets me there and looks around for a while until i introduce myself. i have dug my soft, pink heels into the bones of childhood and i have nothing left to stand on. i wanted to be something you could get your teeth into; i wanted to be raw enough. girlhood knows nothing about enough, so i embody too much and become an open wound.

i wanted so badly to be a woman until i stopped being a girl. woman is the wide, open mouth that swallows girlhood whole; i am still hungry. she chews at the inside of my stomach, i call it aching. she pushes her dreams into the parts of my body i hate the most so that i will notice her. i think she would eat my eggs one by one if it meant she could be reborn.

it is halfway through november now and i am already rehearsing how to tell it i am leaving; girlhood knows nothing about the middle. i chew around the outside of everything and one day, i will be lying inside of a human heart, lying on a bed, lying to the world that i am finally full.

when i climb through december’s bedroom window, it does not turn around. the cold is harsh but girlhood is harsher. she carves her name into the belly of the month; it has been acting distant. mean. different. she knows what this means. when it is someone else’s turn to leave, girlhood finds the middle and cries. she finds the middle and polishes it. she finds the middle is the open wound. the year closes out on her like a father moving out. she stays in her room. she has nowhere else to go.

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mother

she laughs, and i think this is what they mean. she is up early and calling through the bedroom door, from that spot on the landing where two childhoods crossed to meet in the middle. even when she is not stood there, it is where you can find her. the point in the center of it all; the north star. i think of her against the odds, looking down the barrel of a bad time and shooting back at it. i think of her key in the door, shoes slipped off in the hallway, kitchen light buzzing overhead. two chairs pull up to the table and she tells me about her day and we are here despite it all. the years take bows before they exit to the side of the stage. we’re so lucky to see the curtain rise, aren’t we? i think of her knees to the soil out the back, leaning over the seeds of things. i am adamant they would not grow had they not seen her first. jordan comes home in the spring just in time for the first bloom. this is what they mean. i think of her in the summer, off out into the blue. she is blinking and waving and squealing beneath the surface, beckoning for me to follow. i watch her from the point where the sand meets the water. i must learn to be more like her.  she holds her heart in her hands and points to where the cracks have been filled with light. she is teaching me how to be, how to do, how to heal. i am afraid she knows everything except how much i love her. she sings at the stovetop, and i think this is what they mean. i think of her, headstrong and holding the world together. she laughs, and we are here despite it all. this is what they mean. god is a woman, mother.

clb

The day was blue. Wheeled the bikes from the garage,

you set off first down the driveway. 

Turn left at the gate. The roads were wide enough

for two; I stayed behind the whole way like a

hangover. The hills took wind from my chest, 

I think I was alright.

We made it past the post box,

and the horses in the field. You picked the route. 

I had a tendency to be transmutable.

We had little conversation in our bags, only packed

lunch for the stop. There is a particular sound the sun makes

if you sit still for long enough. I threw myself

into the deep end of its song and did not find you there.

Tupperware on knees,

I was a girl in a black dress a long way from home.

By the time we got back on the bikes,

I’d started biting my nails again;

you’d stopped believing in God.

I gave you my youth, you handed my perspective back,

baked our anxieties and baked them into our beliefs.

We’ll never love again after this.

clb

black dress / blue summer