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I walked down the block

  in the wrong direction

  Stopped.

  Back to the intersection, ninety-degree turn

  went up the hill, that felt better

  until it didn’t

  until the houses were the wrong shape to hold

  my family.

  Stopped.

  Back to the intersection, worried, then down the

  third street, the wrong third way.

  Stopped. Back to the intersection

  the fourth spoke of the wheel another mistake.

  Last kid in sight, country mouse,

  five years old, spinning

  at the center of a compass that had lost

  her true north

  A white glove waved, the guard crouched

  wings tucked neatly behind her back,

  eyes all-seeing

  she wiped my tears and took my hand

  and led me

  up the hill again, gold and ruby leaves,

  farther than I’d dared on my own tiny paws,

  until we crested and scurried

  down the other side and the houses

  changed shape and at the very bottom

  of the hill stood my new home

  my mother waiting at the curb.

  practice

  Mr. Irving styled and helmeted my mom’s hair

  introduced her to the other ladies, permed,

  perfumed, fuming about their husbands

  the confessor hairdresser, he knew all

  the juicy details. Told Mom I should join

  the city swim team, cuz all the kids did

  and it would make me tired enough

  to sleep better at night, and not spend

  so much time in her hair.

  There was a slight delay in joining the team

  while I learned to swim in water deeper

  than six inches. But then I traded muddy ponds

  for cement swimming pools in schools

  and parks all over the city, tadpoling

  backstroking, butterflying, freestyling

  until my body leaned, gleamed, hardened

  into a core of speed

  with a snaggletoothed grin.

  Didn’t care much about winning,

  but I hated to come in last, my sweet spot

  was lane seven for long, slow miles of laps

  punctuated by flip turns

  boom!

  powering underwater, mermaid made real

  I felt my gills growing

  I could breathe without air.

  chum

  Underwater, city

  swimming pool

  a shiver of slippery boys

  eleven, twelve years old

  with shark-toothed fingers

  and gap-toothed smiles

  isolate

  the openhearted girls

  eight, nine years old

  tossed in like bloody

  buckets of chum.

  The boys circle, then frenzy-feed

  crotch-grabbing, chest-pinching,

  hate-spitting

  the water afroth

  with glee and destruction.

  Girls stay in the shallows

  after their baptism as bait,

  that first painful lesson

  in how lifeguards

  look the other way.

  lovebrarians

  I hated reading. Loathed the ants

  swarming across the page, lost

  my excitement about school, fought, reduced

  to a puzzle with missing pieces.

  Once branded, the feeling of stupid never fades

  no matter how many medals you win.

  But then we rode the bus downtown

  me and Leslie, who majored in music

  and lived in our attic, Mary Poppins

  with a Jersey accent, we rode the bus downtown,

  the coins hot from my hand plink, plink

  in the box next to the driver, all the way downtown

  to a Carnegie library built by an immigrant

  so everyone could read, free

  and untrammeled by politicians seeking

  to bind them into ignorance,

  chain them to the wheel.

  Leslie promised she’d read me the books

  so I didn’t have to be afraid of mistakes

  and I wrote My Name in big letters

  got my first badge, a library card

  I asked the librarian

  “Can I take out all the books?”

  and she answered quite seriously

  “Of course, dear,

  just not at the same time.”

  And so, with extra Leslie help and a chorus

  of angels disguised as teachers and librarians

  for years unstinting with love and hours

  of practice, those ants finally marched

  in straight lines for me

  shaped words, danced sentences,

  constructed worlds

  for a girl finally learning how to read

  I unlocked the treasure chest

  and swallowed the key.

  poem for my favorite teacher

  Mrs. Sheedy-Shea

  taught me haiku, I word-flew

  off the page, amazed

  hippos

  indoctrinated by magazine covers of skeletal

  white privilege like the Kennedys

  (only peasants ate, apparently)

  my parents, poor-clanned and striving

  rose to the occasion and smothered

  my hunger

  by pinching my hips

  grabbing the fat under my chin

  when I was eight years

  ten, fourteen

  twenty-five hungry years old

  when they grabbed and pinched

  they called me “Baby Hippo”

  the insult disguised as

  love, they said others would tease

  me for being so fat

  so I might as well

  get used to it

  closeted shame

  When we were girls we rode horses

  disguised as bicycles

  though anyone with eyes could see from the way

  we leaned, preened their manes, galloped

  across the plains without ever leaving

  Dorset Avenue, their true equine nature

  we were magic-filled girls at large

  in a world of pedestrian dullness.

  After riding hard, we’d walk to cool

  down our steeds, feed them sugar cubes, pump

  their tires, straighten the playing cards

  in the spokes

  that made the thwacka-thwacka-thwacka-thwack

  announcing our arrival, knees always skinned,

  crusted with scabs from tripping

  over the buckled sidewalk that was heaved

  into the air by killing frosts and held there

  by the roots of long-dead trees,

  left broken to teach children

  lessons about watching our step.

  I used my jump rope for reins and a lasso

  for runaway calves, and the whirling dervish

  of girl games, sky-jumping, earth-touching,

  clap-backing

  shouted with rhymes. We got tangled

  up a lot and fell,

  splitting open our half-healed knees, we licked

  our bloody wounds clean

  and started all over again.

  My bike had a shelf on the back, an ornament,

  I guess, but
made of metal. One day,

  I let a friend’s little sister ride on the back

  of my horse

  on that shelf, her shoelaces tangled

  in the spokes, her leg twisted

  at a horrible angle, then broke.

  Her screams drove

  me to the linen closet, where I hid for hours,

  sobbing

  burning with the horror

  that I’d hurt her, not my fault, but yes,

  totally my fault, and she wore a heavy cast for

  months.

  I stopped playing horses after that.

  The taste of shame smells

  like stubborn vomit in your hair

  lingering no matter how often you wash it

  sometimes you have to shave

  yourself bald

  and start again like a newly hatched chick

  leaving the faint rot of broken magic

  in shattered eggshell pieces

  behind you.

  payback

  After Charlotte’s Web

  but before Little Women,

  my sister stole the key

  to my green plastic diary,

  and blackmailed me

  with what she found

  We shared a room split in two

  with masking tape laid down

  the middle of the floor,

  and the closet, the lines

  never to be crossed

  I hadn’t committed felonies

  or misdemeanors, yet; I was in fifth grade

  but still, she tattled about what I wrote

  how I’d cheated in math

  and planned to do it again

  I repaid her treachery

  by telling stories in the dark

  while we waited for sleep,

  said I was a vampire, the moles

  on my neck proved it,

  part werewolf, too, casting

  stories by the light of the moon

  until she cried for Mom

  who yelled at me for scaring

  my sister, and grounded

  me so I never did it again

  but I threatened to

  whenever she crashed

  through the border

  Maybe I owe her,

  my sister,

  for stealing the key, toying

  with my secrets, and thus igniting

  the slow-fused inevitability

  of me weaving stories

  in the dark

  amplified

  1. Daddy loved Jesus, talked about Him so much when I was little I thought He was a cousin, maybe just a second cousin, which would explain why He was never at Grandma’s for Thanksgiving. Daddy was a preacher on a college campus, he worked in the chapel and I could walk there by myself to say hello if I looked both ways before I crossed the street.

  2. My job was school, I was really good at recess and lunch, but I failed climbing the rope that hung from the sky in gym. I tried to be sick every Friday so I wouldn’t fail the spelling bee. The playground was a war of girls versus boys and now I feel shame cuz some kids must have wanted to stand with the other team, and some must have wanted new teams entirely, but the world was drawn for us binary in clumsy chalk lines, and we’d try to do better when we were in charge.

  3. Protests against the Vietnam War echoed across the campus, our house filled with angry students every weekend, and my mom fed them vats of spaghetti and trays of brownies. Daddy worked all the time because students were getting so high they thought they could fly and they jumped out of dorm windows five stories up, which was awful, and the sadness and the rage and the protests and the soldiers and the yelling and the guns and the FBI tapping our phone and the corpses of Dachau made it hard for Daddy to sleep and he could smell the ashes again and my mom thought he was killing himself and he was, but he was doing it in slow motion.

  4. I finally learned to read and they finally integrated our school and the new kids were really nice and long division was impossible and my mother cut my hair wicked short cuz swimming and everyone thought I was a boy which was NOT FUNNY because I wasn’t and I didn’t want to be one. Boys were gross.

  5. Daddy was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention and he forced us to listen to the Watergate hearings on the radio, he hated Richard Nixon with all of his heart and soul; when drunk, Daddy threatened to kill the son of a bitch because he was destroying the country. I watched the level of gin in the bottle and realized that counting the bottles was more important.

  6. Spring of sixth grade, all of us crammed into the music room, sticky hot and stinky cuz we were almost seventh graders and the chairs were too small and our hormones were blowing UP. But we were children. Who smelled. It was a confusing time. Our music teacher, Mrs. Schermerhorn, dragged us through a rehearsal for the Spring Musical Performance That No One Wanted to Hear. We were terrible singers and horrible children, but

  something happened

  the planets lining up, gods playing cosmic checkers, a butterfly flapping in Bangladesh

  she made us sing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” yeah, that one, from Sound of Music, when Maria and her family stop in a convent as they are escaping the Nazis, a song about doing hard things, we sang that song without fooling and when we were finished Mrs. Schermerhorn coughed, cleared her throat, warned us not to move, and she ran out

  (of course we moved and gossiped and complained and farted and rolled our eyes it was June and we only had a few days left).

  7. This all went down right around the time my parents stopped worrying about things like school concerts and report cards. I thought I was the only kid with a house on fire, but I wasn’t.

  8. Mrs. Schermerhorn returned with our principal, Miss Hartnett, and she told us to sing again. Nervous, too many yearlings in a small corral, we didn’t want to obey, but we had no choice, we sang

  letting go

  opening

  and ninetyish voices, some cracking, some strained under weights unseen, murmurated, a flock of swooping starlings, harmonizing, resonating, shaking the windows in the pain, bending the laws of physics to the pure hearts of children for the length of a song from a Broadway musical

  that made two brilliant, kind, ignored women cry

  briefly

  and lifted us to a place we weren’t old enough to understand.

  first blood

  When husbands raped wives

  in 1972, it was legal.

  Property rights were all the rage

  you know.

  I got my first period

  in 1972 and

  I didn’t know why

  I was bleeding.

  When bosses groped women

  in 1972, it was legal

  because bosses

  (all of them male)

  made the rules.

  We girls saw a filmstrip

  in 1972, about

  hygiene and sanitary napkins,

  so confusing because

  it never mentioned

  the blood.

  When women were fired

  in 1972

  because they got pregnant

  in 1972,

  it was all very legal

  in 1972,

  no questions were ever asked.

  We learned boys

  were dangerous,

  in 1972, cuz their pee

  could get us pregnant

  and kicked out of school.

  The FBI spied on women

  in 1972, and it was legal.

  Men feared the liberation

  movement might change

  all of the rules.

  My mother lacked a mouth

  in 1972, so she could
n’t

  explain the mystery

  of the blood.

  She gave me a

  pink box of tampons,

  directions hidden inside,

  then closed the door

  between us.

  No words.

  fencing

  Levy Junior High, seventh grade

  long, dark walks to school on winter mornings

  world deep-bundled in snow, the game

  was to scuttle into the street, grab hold

  of the back bumper of a school bus

  or the bread truck,

  let it pull us down the frozen roads

  of Syracuse, sliding toward the Eleusinian

  mysteries of adolescence. Mom hated

  that school cuz of the knife fight, but I liked

  it, though my shyness limited me to the sidelines,

  you can learn a lot from watching quietly

  a great art teacher taught us

  how much fun it is to make things

  from scratch

  Eighth grade, another year, another school

  me, the quiet scholarship kid,

  Mom was happy cuz there were no knife fights

  there, no fights of any kind, unless you count the

  upper-school cutthroat competition

  for valedictorian

  I was a cheerleader, can you believe it?

  One-third of the base of a girl pyramid

  pom-pommed in modest, itchy uniforms

  I learned to fence with an épée

  studied sumacs, danced the steps of fragile

  friendships, but it was Mr. Edwards

  who changed my life,

  he didn’t just teach us Greek mythology,

  Mr. Edwards ensorcelled us

  with stories of gods and wars, mothers

  in search of lost daughters,

  and girls fleeing rapists

  by turning into trees

  I wanted to stay in that school

  forever

  cemetery girl

  When not swimming, my middle

  school summers played

  out in Oakwood Cemetery

  where I lay

  on a flat, warm tomb

  day after day

  and

  read read read read read read