at the ferry dock
and if he sees Bobby anywhere near me,
he’ll shoot him,
he swears to God,
he will.
The Thing About Boats
This is the thing about boats.
You meet people out there
on the water
that you never normally would
on land.
People on boats
are usually
swimming between one place
and another,
the past or the future,
this body of land
or that one.
Being at sea
is being somewhere
in the middle of things.
Being at sea
is being everywhere
and nowhere
all at once.
Marlene
I was on my way back home when I met Marlene.
She turned to me on the ferry boat,
a stranger of foreign proportions,
somebody’s out-of-town guest.
Isn’t it beautiful here? she said.
I’d had so much beauty in my life
I was practically hungover from it.
The sea, looking like lava and spittle,
careened out behind us.
Marlene went on to say she was recovering
from lowa and alcoholism,
and I noted that she was too doped-up on salt water
to think straight.
I could get used to a place like this,
she said, and I told her how it was:
the deer you kill just driving into town,
the rain that ruins your birthday parties,
the mothers who become your ex-mothers
almost immediately after you can walk.
Marlene didn’t seem to care;
she wore a charmed smile,
a dubious track record,
and she was high on the promise of the place.
Look out there, she said,
grabbing one of my tired arms
and spinning me west.
With my pupils smaller
than they had been in months,
she pointed out
that the sea, on this summer day,
was a blanket of light
and that she, Marlene, was ready
to have her days filled with light like that.
I stood beside her,
a little changed and unchanged,
barely even caring that my cheeks were getting burned,
that my hair was tangling itself beyond extraction
into hers.
Home to the Pocket
I leap rivers and mountains,
I float across the platter of night
to reach my house, the other state
still fresh on my hands.
I’ve only been gone four days
but when I arrive, my father hugs me hard
and my sister tells me I’m a jerk
and my stepmother is gasping like a fish,
from panic and maybe liquor, and I am
back in the pocket,
sixteen and still my father’s girl,
the sweet hard star of his hand
upon mine, the wide planks of sky
filling my eye.
Lost Warnings
By the time I get home, I’ve been grounded for two
months and my sister has already found out where I’ve
been and with whom.
I could have warned you about him, but you wouldn’t
have listened to me anyway, she says.
Yes, I would have, I say, not sure if I mean it.
Are you kidding? You’re too busy being you to ever
listen to me.
I stare at her.
How could she not know that all I ever wanted was to
listen to her stupid warnings? How could she not know
that I was desperate for every tall tale she had to tell?
How come families are full of people that have no clue
how they make each other feel?
Radio Silence
I called Jenny today
and told her I miss her.
She said, It’s about time, you big lame-ass
and then made me promise
that the second
I’m un-grounded,
we’re going record shopping.
As for my stepbrother,
he hasn’t said one word to me
since I got home.
Tacos
Last night I sat down next to Spencer
and watched an entire episode
of Star Trek with him
and when it was over,
I said, That was good
and he got up and left the room
like I wasn’t ever even there.
So tonight, after I found my globe
sitting on my bed
with a note from him that said,
I don’t want this anymore,
I went to the kitchen and
made him our favorite food
and went into his room
handed him seven tacos on a plate
and walked out.
All I can think
is that if he doesn’t want me back now,
he never will.
The Thing About Telescopes
The stars are out in full bloom tonight,
so while everyone sleeps,
I bring my dad’s telescope out of the garage
and point it up to the sky.
What they don’t tell you about telescopes, though,
is that they make your eyes hurt
from the squint and the strain
and that no matter how much you adjust and focus,
it’s still hard to see the stars
you came out there to see.
Maybe telescopes weren’t made to bring you closer
to what’s up there, after all.
Maybe telescopes were made to help you realize
that the stars will always be far away
and maybe that’s part
of what makes them so beautiful.
Bacon and Eggs
When I get up the next morning,
Susan has mock-scrambled-eggs
and Fakin’ Bacon waiting for me
and she says she got Dad to agree
I could go see Denise.
Then she tells me that
she ran away once
when she was a girl,
but it was for three weeks
not just three days.
It’s funny—I never imagined
my stepmother as a “girl” before,
only as the lady
who moved into my house
without asking,
but I guess everyone’s
got another version of themselves
living inside them,
you just don’t get to see it
all the time.
Visitor’s Center
Susan drops me off at the visitor’s center
and tells me she’ll be back in half an hour.
It’s weird but I kind of want her to stay
because I have no idea what my best friend
is going to be like or act like
but then after a few minutes
out walks Denise.
I can’t say she looks great
but she doesn’t look awful,
she’s just not a whole lot
like the girl I grew up with,
but then again, she’d bagged and buried
that version of herself
a long time ago.
As she walks towards me,
I realize maybe sometimes things aren’t meant
to go back to what they were before,
and as Denise hugs me hello,
it’s a new thing and an old one
and that’s just how it is
and it’s
good.
Dear Denise
After we get home, I stand out in the yard
watching the rain bear down on our hometown.
I imagine you not in the hospital but instead
in Mexico, climbing the pyramids
and living to tell about it.
I imagine your sunburn is deepening, its pink landscape
spreading across your arms and shoulders.
You are taking to the pyramids on all fours,
overdosing on that great, triangular height.
I think of you nearing the top,
the way those ancient stones must feel,
the atoms of heat tittering around you.
I imagine you opening yourself up to the world,
to storms and pyramids,
to all these small, immaculate dangers
that make up our lives.
Home Safe
Tonight is my dad’s birthday and
Susan made turkey spaghetti
(somewhere between a vegan
and red meat meal).
When we all sit down,
my dad holds up his mug of beer
and makes a toast, something mushy
about how he loves us all
and he always will
and he’s glad we’re all home safe.
Then he gets up and goes around the table
and kisses Susan full on the mouth
and dips her like they’re on the dance floor
and my sister says, People! Please!
Spencer and I crack up
and he gives me the tiniest little smile.
How we all came together,
I have no idea, but however it did,
it happened,
like a miracle of science,
of chemistry or biology,
we came together
and we stayed.
For a Minute
A new guy moved into our neighborhood
and my sister says I can have him.
He’s too young for her
even though he’s cute.
I see him outside his house doing chores
today when I’m walking the dogs
down to the beach.
She was right.
He is cute.
Cuter than cute.
He gives me a wave and
my heart thumps
and I start imagining
everything that could happen;
our whole story unfolds
in four seconds flat.
Isn’t it strange the places on the map
your heart can take you?
And then you figure out
sometimes it’s okay to stay still for a while,
you don’t have to go everywhere all at once,
you can see a boy
and you can love him for a minute
and maybe it’s real and maybe it’s not
but sometimes all you have to do is
wave back and
keep going.
Shoreline
I keep going
all the way down to the shoreline.
You’d think the dogs would love it here,
the way the salt kisses the stones,
but something scares them
about the way the waves
recede and return
out and back in again.
I take my mother’s globe
out of my backpack,
the globe that’s been given from her to me
and from me to my stepbrother
and now back to me again.
I take aim and throw it out into the sea
and it seems like for a second
the dogs might swim after it
but they don’t.
I stand there watching it
and after a while it starts drifting out
farther and farther and I know now
I’ll never see her again
and it took me a while to figure out
that’s not good or bad
it’s just the way
it is.
On My Arm
I am back in my hometown. I am eating biscuits at the
café, I’m writing a novel on my arm. This is the first
part of Chapter 1, near my wrist. On the way to break-
fast, I see a white horse, its knees buckling into the
pasture. It’s summer again and the clamor for shellfish
is on; the tide’s out and birds and businessmen both are
up to their elbows in sand. It’s so postcard-perfect here
that I’m building a tolerance for beauty. Things I hate,
like bird shit and link sausage, flatbed trucks and
tattooed forearms, even they seem charmed. At the
beach, as the gulls get luckier than the grocers, I think
of the white horse fallen down, the fingers of water
that manage to poke their way into everything, my little
life on its tiny plate, with a side dish of sky and a spoon
to go with it.
Wonderful
I don’t even bother knocking on my stepbrother’s door,
I just barge in and pull him off his bed
and say, You’re coming with me.
All the way down to the docks,
he won’t talk to me
but that’s okay because I shove him in the dinghy
and I say, Row and he does.
We take turns rowing
until we are in the center of the bay
and I say that I’m sorry for leaving him like that
but sometimes you have to do stupid things
to swim your way back into the smart ones.
After a second, he says, Fine. I forgive you.
I look at his often-annoying face
and I lean over and whisper
into his mostly dirty ears
the first of many stupid warnings
and tall tales that I plan to
spend his life telling him.
I guess if you look at it
I’m right where I started
and everything is still trees and water and rain
and small town, small town,
but no matter how you slice it,
it is my life
and I am floating right out here
in the middle of it.
Kirsten Smith is the cowriter of the feature films Legally Blonde, 10 Things I Hate About You, Ella Enchanted, and She’s the Man. Her award-winning poetry has appeared in such literary journals as The Gettysburg Review, Witness, Massachusetts Review, and Prairie Schooner. She lives in Los Angeles, where she likes going to rock shows and hanging out with her dogs. Her Web site is www.kiwilovesyou.com.
acknowledgments
The author gratefully acknowledges the following publications in which several poems in this book have previously appeared: Hayden’s Ferry Review, Left Bank, The Massachusetts Review, North Dakota Quarterly, On the Bus, Rush Hour, Shenandoah, Soundings East, and Witness.
Utmost love and gratitude to Mel and Katie Aline, best friends, beautiful parents and purveyors of the finest writer’s colony on the West Coast. Infinite thanks to Susan Phillips, the best teacher I’ve ever had. Thank you to Steven Malk, punk rock agent extraordinaire, for inspiring this endeavor; Megan Tingley for her belief in the book; and Amy Hsu for her wonderful and precise guidance. To Ryan Latimer, Gregory McCracken, Stacey Lutz, and Micah Rafferty for their collegiate encouragement, when it was most needed. To Catalaine Knell, for always reminding me I am a poet. To Seth Jaret for his enthusiasm and creativity. Love and kisses to Noel Krueger for being the girl I’ve always looked up to. Many thanks to Shannon Woodward for lending her foxiness to the cover of this book. To Brandon McWhorter for his creativity. To Elwood Reid and Doug Cooney for their inspirational work and wisdom. Thanks to The MacDowell Colony, who provided the picnic lunches that fortified many of these poems. To Shauna Cross for her witty prose. To
Alene Moroni, Michael Hacker, and Doug Wyman for their constant and true friendship. Thank you, Lusty, for being such a drama king. And thanks to the movies, Madonna, and Courtney Love, all of whom inspired me to leave town and then come back again.
As the ferry coasts into downtown,
all lit up and windy and magic,
I realize kids who grow up in cities
must never dream of
going anywhere else
because they’re already there.
Penny is ready to escape the pocket of home, ready to be in love, ready to find her way in the world. Navigating the choppy waters of teenage life, she confronts the complicated truths of her not-quite-normal family, the highs and lows of high school, her lost mother and her lost best friend, and one alluring bad boy who just might be more adventure than she bargained for.
Written in raw, captivating verse, Kirsten Smith’s powerful novel explores the heartbreak and humor of what it really means to be a girl stumbling towards adulthood without a map.
PRAISE FOR
the geography of girlhood
“A quirky and poignant story filled with wonderful details.”
—Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Prep
“Smith’s poems are tender maps of beauty and pain, of longing and hard-won truths, of a young girl’s journey to womanhood.”
—Sonya Sones, author of What My Mother Doesn’t Know
“Totally fresh, innovative, intimate, sad, exciting, and unforgettable.… Makes you feel like you are not as alone as you thought you were.”
—Jennifer Belle, author of High Maintenance
The Geography of Girlhood Page 7
