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Posts Tagged ‘teenage’

Home Ec, Seventh Grade

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on October 1, 2023| 13 Comments »


Mrs. Johnson, newly married,
looked like a Charlie’s Angel,
and while the boys were in shop class,
she taught us girls to be women.
We learned to make white sauce
from butter, flour and milk.
Learned to sew stuffed animals by hand,
how to make skirts with a machine.
Learned to balance a book
on our heads while we walked,
and we learned
the proper measurements
for a woman: thirty five, twenty five, thirty five.
Mrs. Johnson wrapped the yellow tape measure
around her own chest, her own waist, her own hips,
proving herself.
Then she put two tape measures
on each table and told us to measure
the girl assigned to sit next to us.
Kim Fields. She wore Wranglers. Mascara.
Gold combs in her feathered hair.
She had a boyfriend. They’d kissed.
She ate lunch at the popular table.
I never wanted to be like her.
I totally wanted to be like her.
The smile on her lips was vicious
as she wrapped the cloth measure
around my chest,
her fingers tugging the strip tight
as I crumpled inside.
She smirked as she called out the numbers.
In pencil, I wrote twenty-eight on the handout,
filling in the top blank
that was supposed to represent me—
me, a textbook example
of unkissed, preteen prudery.
When it was my turn to measure Kim,
she grabbed the tape from my hands,
said, “Let’s see what a real woman is.”
She wrapped her own hands
around her puffed out chest,
the same hands that held
Louie Floyd’s hands between class,
and she pushed out her breasts,
those same breasts
we all knew Louie Floyd had touched.
“Thirty-five,” she sang out,
filling in her blank, her voice a ripe fist
that squeezed my flat chest even flatter.
I cared too much then about those blanks.
Months later, I, too, learned the pleasures of kissing.
But it was years before I learned
those were not the blanks that mattered.
 
 
 

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One Parenting

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on August 3, 2018| Leave a Comment »

 

 

 

as if sweet talk

or threats might make

the rain fall up

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