Tag: Adolescence

Things of the Earth

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By David B. Prather

Featured Art by Karen Renee

We knew what it meant to grow up
in the suburbs, the product of poor beginnings―
the progeny of farmers who readied the earth
with horse-drawn plows, and women
who kept having children

until it killed them,
people who didn’t know anything else,
surviving the Great Depression
by telling ghost stories and war stories
never meant to be believed.

We never let on.
The girl across the street swore
her mother was a full-blooded Spanish princess,
when we knew she was Mexican.
We were too young to know it didn’t matter.

The Pentecostals three doors down,
women with uncut hair and denim skirts,
men with lives like any other, were the only ones
who were sure in their conviction
they were headed for heaven.

The rest of us resented them
because this meant we were condemned,
like the old tool shed down the dead end
where all the kids used to play,
scaring rabbits in and out of the rotting lumber.

We just had nowhere to go
in the middle of summer. So we dared
the clotted vines of poison ivy, itching
the next day, and grateful for the calamine lotion
pinking our arms and legs

in thick splotches through which our fingernails
dragged until the welts broke
and the fluid spread. How it ever stopped
we couldn’t guess. We ran through
the rain-wet grass, mud-soaked when we found

a one-and-a-half-foot nightcrawler.
Not even the boys would touch it
except with a stick to carry it to the breezeway
where we watched the awful thing suffer
the concrete, already half dead anyway.

As fascinated as we were
by the things of the earth, we should
never have realized the sky was blue.
But there it was, hanging over us
large as any relative who came back

from the front line, shell-shocked
and gun crazy, unable to make a living
at even the smallest thing he tried,
or the girl who hated Christmas
for its one beaded necklace,

who never forgave herself for the gift
of scarlet fever that killed her father,
or any of the rest of us who cursed
in the old backward ways, convinced someday
we could care for ourselves. We could let this go.

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Grimace

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mickie Kennedy

I liked him because nobody knew what he was. We were alike, bulging in all the wrong places. We tottered around, as if our bodies weren’t meant for movement. As if our bodies weren’t quite ours.

When I was twelve, my mother dropped me at the mall for a meet-and-greet. Grimace was planted in front of a plastic date palm. I was the oldest kid there. Permed mothers kept sending me dubious looks. A group of boys pointed, then giggled.

When I finally reached the front, he was bigger than I’d imagined—a swollen spade, a hill-sized bruise. He pulled me close for a photo, and I kept myself against him. The mothers whispered, but I didn’t let go. I couldn’t. You gotta move on, kid, said the head inside the head. A soft voice. Too soft. Human.

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Fortune Cookie

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Brad Aaron Modlin

Featured Art: Emaciation by Brooke Ripley

Yes, everyone says to add “in bed” to end
everything with sex, but all I think of is
the deathbed. Your hard work
will soon pay off
in bed. Great surprises await
in bed. Your experiment’s results
will reveal themselves
in bed. When I Christmas-visit
my parents, who love me in ways I
can’t understand, they say,
“We don’t want to leave you
a lot of junk to sort through
[when we die],” so when they dial
Chinese takeout, I suggest pizza.
No cookies.
I think about it all January. It’s still
that January, I think, I’m only in the middle
of it. If you say you’re in the middle,
you assume you know the end date,
that’s why religious Southerners say, “Lord
willin’” when making plans.
In a college poem, I made
the Gingerbread Man pickup lines about lic-
orice. I was afraid to rhyme cookie
with nookie, embarrassed by words
that might be 40–90% crass?
Afraid to expose myself
to danger: our Shakespeare
professor defined la petite mort.
I was afraid to talk about
death. My Brit Lit professor
angered me by saying,
“It’s all sex, death,
and madness,” so I yelled,
“People fully clothed
and alive under rainbows of sanity!”
Even I didn’t realize at the bar
the Gingerbread Man was flirting
with the fox.
No matter who writes the story,
everyone dies. I am too old
to find this so surprising.
Too young to keep repeating
the crassest word.
Too waste-averse to ask the fortune
teller to flip my cards
on her front porch. Congratulations!
You are on your way
in bed. All your troubles will pass quickly
in bed. Stormy seas ahead
in bed. You will find bliss
in bed. Love is around the corner
in bed. Love is around, love is.

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My Hometown, the Hypothetical Guided Tour

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Dan Wiencek

Featured Art: by Jasper Francis Cropsey

            First we come to the field
where I did not hit the winning
     home run, where no cheers rose
            up and the game ball went ungiven

     Beyond left field,
            the bleachers where I did not
    make out with my high-school
         crush, did not taste her perfume
                  or dodge her brother’s freckled glare

      This is the house where a family of
                color did not live, there, where
         that guy is hosing Chinese
                              menus off his car

     Then of course this tax attorney’s office, once
            the bookstore where I stole
                        Helter Skelter, which I still
                     visit in my dreams

                 Finally, this empty lot
          staring up at the sun like a vast
                   gravel eye, formerly the school where
     I never thought to imagine a future,
         where no one told me and I
             did not listen

                        that life could be a wave
      beating the rocks or

           a wind bouncing a kite—

                         taut string pinwheels,
               dips and swoops groundward only
    to right itself, to stay resolutely
                                                                in the air

                                              and here we are.

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Midnight at the Anaconda Wire and Cable Company

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sandy Gingras

Featured Art: Position Interplay: Midnight by Samia Halaby

The building is boarded up, but we know how to get in.
It’s the end of summer and we’re seventeen. We don’t have a car
and there’s nowhere to go in this town except down

the huge hills gliding our bikes past the A&P,
the Ben Sun store where my mother buys my gym uniform, past
the funeral home and the corner bar where Eddie’s father sits

in the same chair every afternoon. The air is humid,
and the stars look stalled out in the sky. Maybe they’re waiting
for us to try something or to grow up already like my mother tells

me to do. A train goes past and faces stare out of the fluorescent lights.
My flip-flops ring on the metal stairs. Eddie puts his shoulder on
a board, and we’re through. It’s just the way it always is—

the way they left it. Eddie sweeps his flashlight across
the cables and cogs and steel beams, the stacks of papers
next to the stapler. This place is leaking

PCPs into the Hudson River, my mother says, but we don’t know
what PCPs are. All I know is, this is where my father worked
before he left my mother. Eddie and I grew up two brick houses

away from each other. Tonight we’re here to take one last look at
the muscley machines. I’m leaving for school tomorrow.
See, some things last, Eddie says to me. I don’t tell him different.

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My Younger Self Attempts Breakdancing at the Sadie Hawkins Dance

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kerry James Evans

Featured Art: Dryland Farming #24, Monegros County, Aragon, Spain by Edward Burtynsky

I spin like an adolescent bottle
pointing in empty directions,

the colors of the divided gym
spiraling like one of Mrs. Peters’

chemistry experiments, the blurry
girls staring, the boys huddled together

like cows in a thunderstorm.
A minute ago, I’d sensed the movement,

two Samanthas on their way to our side
with their rare request.

Would you like to . . . ?
But I wasn’t waiting. I’d have my say first.

Now, I listen for the beat to drop
and I pose, balancing

all my weight on my left hand,
each leg a limp karate kick.

I move as a squid flees
a cameraman’s light,

arms crawling like
honeysuckle along a trellis.

If I love my body,
if any of us love our bodies,

we don’t know it yet.
What I do know?

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Zenyatta

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Grady Chambers

Featured Art: French Knight, 14th Century, by Paul Mercuri

              Breeders’ Cup, November 2010

In a different life she wins.
In a different November in Kentucky she leans
into the last curve of the brown-combed track
as she passes the thick of the field. In that one,
in a bar far away, in our lucky coats
and muddy white sneakers, we rise
with the televised crowd as she quickens
at the flick of the jockey, as the grandstand churns
at the distance beginning to close, as the line comes closer.

And we know it as her rider leans forward,
as Zenyatta knows it in her legs
as the horse before her turns
and knows it’s over, the brown mane flying by
in a whip of color and dust, as the stands become a flicker
of white tickets, as her name is spoken skyward like a chant.

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Just Say No

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kelly Michels

Featured Art: by Feliphe Schiarolli

We didn’t say a word when the officer visited our classroom.
We didn’t pass a note or mumble, didn’t blink when the TV
flickered on, when the stats, wrapped in white, settled
on the screen. We didn’t dare color outside the lines
of the worry-eyed cartoon character buying weed from a teenage
bully or the gang of stick figures shouting in the margins.

We pretended not to see each other,
not to know the smell of bong smoke, late at night,
how it would drift through the air vents with their
laughter, how it would rise in a fog as we slept.

We pretended not to flinch when the egg hit the pan,
the yolk thundering against the cladded aluminum,
or when the officer pointed to the display of syringes
on the screen, the scenes of cherubic teens
snorting a line for the first time, the background darkening,
their eyes, lifeless, because the result is death,
the officer said, while pointing to a photo of a casket.

We pretended not to know how the dead could rise,
how they rose each morning to put away our cereal boxes
and make our beds, how they were waiting for us now
in their long white robes smeared with peanut butter
and hair dye, their tired bodies floating across the pearly
linoleum floors, the bones in their fingers thrumming
the edge of the kitchen sink to the sound of Clarence Clemons
in their heads, “The Promised Land” rising like a dark cloud 
from the desert floor, their eyes lost in the throbbing
autumnal light, the snaking of branches across
the kitchen window, the tick-tock of the wind against
the leaves, how it feels like eternity, as they watch
for the bus, the broken ice maker buzzing,
the dishwasher rumbling, milk parting their burned coffee,
waiting for their children to return to them
to wipe their small skulls clean.

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Jenny Perowski is Ahead of Me in the Grocery Store Line

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Julie Danho

Featured Art:  (Untitled–Flower Study) by Mary Vaux Walcott

If an Amish family can forgive the man who burned
their land, surely I can say hello to Jenny Perowski,
who used to call me “fattie fat” in seventh grade math
and had boys call my house, pretending to ask me out.
That was twenty years ago. Now Jenny, if not fat exactly,
is puffy as a slightly overstuffed chair. I’m thinner than her,
and my pleasure feels more whiskey than cream, makes me
want to pour out her Kors bag to rifle for candy, then slowly
eat it in front of her like she once did to me. I know
her cruelty was, at best, a misdemeanor. But anger
is like a peppermint in a pocketbook—everything inside
takes on its smell and taste. I could break it in my teeth,
make it disappear. Instead, I savor the mint, let the sugar
line my mouth like fur, linger far past what can be called
pleasure. How good it would be to be better than this.

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Grammar School

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mark Belair

Featured Art: Project for an Overdoor by Carlo Marchionni or Filippo Marchionni

Through the municipal green, overpainted wire mesh
obscuring the grammar school basement windows

comes the spank of a basketball not engaged in any game,
just pounded in place in an empty, echoing cafeteria, then

an outside metal door gets gut-punched open to release
gruff-voiced janitor, belt keys jangling, cursing at the world

while from a first-floor office a stretch of plastic packing tape
screaks off a roll as a phone rings and a copy machine whumps

as if providing a bass line to a class that, upstairs,
bursts into a trebly, mocking laugh, after which,

yet farther up, in a distantly reverberant bathroom, a toilet
flushes and keeps running even after a door slams shut and

all the old, hard memories flood
back enough for me to know

that if a documentary film was made
about daily life in grammar school—

with shot after shot of small, solemn faces
taring out at us—

its scoreless soundtrack
would be this.

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When Mr. Bridges Died

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Kraushaar

Featured Art: (Children Swimming) by Unidentified 

When Mr. Bridges died I knew
the whole eighth grade would have to gather
in the gym and sit there on those cheerless,
folding metal chairs set up by string-bean
Donny Graf the constant burper.
Mr. Bridges was a substitute,
we hardly knew him, but
I knew that there we’d be, all of us,
and there would be our stiff-grinning
twitchy principal, Mr. Albert Fraze, to slowly,
slowly stand and tell us what a deep
and lasting loss this was for all of us.
And later, sitting there three rows from the exit
by fatso Robert Randall who’d socked me
in the stomach on the 8 bus once,
I knew that Mr. Fraze would drill us
with the first long look that said, Every one of you
should be ashamed, ashamed for even thinking about,
for even thinking about thinking about
turning your gaze away one ten
thousandth of an inch:
a man is dead today.
And then would come this clumsy, freighted
metaphor and though I doubt I knew the word
(metaphor) I knew our Mr. Fraze: Mr. Bridges
was a kind of bridge, he’d say,
or found a bridge, or formed a bridge, or built
a bridge, or was a bridge from ignorance to wisdom,
from confusion to compassion, blah, blah, blah,
which is exactly what he said so that
sitting there I thought of that four-cabled
quarter-mile Roebling tower bridge
and I thought of its glittering
river city Cincinnati since we’d studied it all week.
I pictured its reaching, curving waterway, the great
Ohio and I thought of the circling terns and swirling slicks
and chemical froths and then I thought of a row of houseboats
and a paddlewheel steamer with a single, smiling
tourist, anyone and no one, waving once.

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