After the Kiss

by Terra Elan McVoy

  she likes so much.

  But now Mom is home and there are only

  leftovers and applesauce.

  The laundry isn’t folded

  and I’ve got the stereo on

  way too loud.

  She leans on the counter, says

  So about our spring break . . .

  We were planning

  to go together

  to the mountains or the beach,

  where her friend

  has a house

  she always wants us to use.

  It is two weeks away, Mom

  doesn’t know I am hoping

  she’ll be excited

  to see that St. Andrews school instead.

  I imagine her face turning purple,

  nostrils spewing smoke.

  I stay quiet one more moment,

  before it spills out

  over my trembling hands

  in one long stream

  of thisissuchagoodschool.

  She shakes her head, drops it down,

  lifts it again, smiles.

  You want this to happen. We’ll make it work.

  She pours some wine

  to make a toast, asks me

  to tell her more.

  Robomom

  The wires and switches in her are clicking—

  I can almost hear the hum

  of her engines, all the android autopilot

  that has gotten her to this point in life,

  all laserbeamed now

  on me and college.

  She hardly eats, paging

  through all the information

  I brought down from my room:

  housing, financial aid, tuition costs, curriculum.

  She has questions I didn’t even know I’d need to ask

  and if her head

  had a slot in the back

  it would spool out a long tape of calculations.

  By bedtime she has a list of numbers

  and people to e-mail

  on my behalf in the morning.

  It is so totally transforming,

  so complete—

  it’s nice but almost

  scary.

  Springing Jenna (and Myself) from Prison

  The sunshine makes everyone invincible.

  This morning in guitar

  I got an idea—a crazythought from brother

  I could not put down.

  I asked Jenna

  to meet me outside for lunch,

  and now I pull her across the parking lot,

  my hand encompassing her birdy wrist.

  She is drag-foot protesting, but the pear trees are

  snowing themselves

  along the fence

  and the breeze is a running horse beside us—no one

  is sitting inside cinderblock today.

  Paloma with her white-toothed laugh

  stands beside Jonah’s car.

  He is in the passenger seat, strumming

  his own guitar.

  They see us and now we cannot turn back.

  Jenna’s long white hair blows

  across her face, like a little girl at the beach,

  uncertain

  about an undertow.

  I say, This is Jenna. This is Paloma and Jonah.

  Jonah says, Listen to this—

  and begins a song about King Kong.

  He sings.

  We laugh.

  The sunshine pours down all around us.

  What I Get for Trading Days with Janayah

  Everyone’s coffeeing on the patio this afternoon

  and for the first time, today,

  I fill the ice machine twice.

  Madras shorts and twill skirts wait in long lines

  for lavender lemonades,

  and wineglasses aren’t red

  but white.

  Stan puts reggae

  on the stereo,

  and there is a flip-flop bounce

  —a sundress lilt—

  to even Margot’s business face.

  Then a cloud passes

  —I think over the sun—

  and the temperature drops

  fifteen degrees.

  My face is frozen.

  My hands are ice.

  It is Wednesday

  and there is Alec

  walking in the door.

  I Remember You As You Were (with apologies to Pablo Neruda)

  I remember you as you were in the last month.

  You were the jaunty baseball cap

  and the deceitful heart.

  In your eyes the flames of betrayal blazed on.

  And the cold rain fell in the cavern of your soul.

  Clasping my own arms like a withering plant

  the new leaves have softened your voice,

  that is anxious and pleading.

  Bonfire of surprise in which my anger is burning.

  Bitter red thornbush twisted over my soul.

  I feel your eyes traveling,

  and the summer is not far off:

  baseball cap, voice of a river, heart

  like an abandoned house

  inside which my deep longings once lived

  and my kisses fell, happy as embers.

  Sky from a schoolyard. Diamond across the field.

  Your memories are made of shadows, of smoke, of

  a vanished lake!

  Beyond your eyes, farther on, the tears may be blazing.

  But cold winter rain revolves in my soul.

  An Exact Fit

  I

  thought it was gone

  —the need to touch him—

  but here he is,

  standing on the patio,

  during a break I could get written up for taking,

  and all I can think,

  seeing the muscle twitch

  in his bronze arm

  is: my hand

  belongs

  there.

  Phantom Pain

  I took my heart,

  cut it out,

  and put it

  in a box.

  It was nailed shut—slammed—

  crossed twice with barbed wire.

  I bled for days.

  I bled all night.

  There was no more bleeding that I could do.

  It must only be

  scar tissue, pulsing now, hearing him say

  I can’t picture

  a future

  that doesn’t have you in it.

  I was filling out housing forms

  and my hand wouldn’t budge.

  There are no more nerve endings in there

  —they’ve all burned to a crisp—

  it must only be some phantom heart inside me

  twisting now in pain.

  Insult to Injury

  The nothing I’ve said

  is a chasm between us

  —and he will drop, he will

  plummet—if I don’t say something now.

  Suddenly I am

  snatched back:

  Margot in the doorway, hissing What are you doing

  out here?

  no time to twist

  any words

  into a life-saving rope.

  I watch his hopes fall,

  crash on concrete,

  as I’m jerked from the edge, grabbing his body

  in one brief—and too silent—

  uncertain embrace.

  Camille

  completely unexpected

  it is wednesday and it is not your regular night but after group work in the library for your upcoming american revolutions project deadline—you are in charge of compiling the notes, which is better than having to design the poster—you are not ready to go home just yet, especially since you got to drive. it was a beautiful afternoon and is a pretty evening so you cruise a bit down highland and then take some curvy turns through residential streets—going slow, leaning forward over the steering wheel, staring at the humongous antebellum ho
uses with the giant porches and stained glass—until you find yourself on the back road to decatur, taking enough wrong turns (and right ones) to find a street you know. it is still darkening early, but not as early as before, and the sky is the kind of lavender that reminds you of expensive earrings. the dark shapes of birds fly across it back and forth between the tops of sidewalk trees. you sit there a moment watching them, in your space outside the coffeehouse—as though someone saved it for you—and in your mind you plan the first words of a real postcard—one this time you will really send. you are reaching across to the backseat, you are grabbing your laptop bag and opening the door with your foot, and at the same time you see them: a couple in the closed-in patio, the fading sun outside and the amber lamps within lighting them up like a diorama play. these things happen—you are not sure of the order, because they come at you all at once: she reaches for his arm; it is the catcher; you slam your car door; a boss-woman beckons; the couple embraces, then he turns away. and it is as though you have crossed into some alternate world, stepping onto the sidewalk. what is he doing here? this isn’t right. what is also all wrong is his face—his twisted, sad-gut face as the coffeecounter girl watches him, her own face a broken apology. you don’t know what you are seeing and at the same time you understand what you are seeing in the only way it can be understood. it is as though you are in two bodies—one on the shores of disbelief, the other plunging your head under the waves of full understanding—so when he is suddenly too-fast already there on the second open patio where the smokers don’t even lift their heads as he’s barging past, your own body doesn’t move fast enough out of his line of vision, only causes enough of a flicker to make him raise his eyes. and they are eyes you have seen before, empty sad eyes you know, and they turn on you and they know you and they are horrified. he halts, unbelieving, as though you are some ghost summoned from christmas future, and before barreling off again you hear him without really seeing his lips move: i wish i never met you. and then he is gone up the street and you are somehow back in your car, the key in the ignition as you stare out the windshield, your heart in your throat.

  paralysis

  you are still just sitting in the car ten minutes later, staring. your body is heavy and you can’t seem to make yourself lift your hands to the steering wheel—they are just there, on the key, in the ignition, where you started. you are not seeing the car in front of you, really, only the just-now vision of the catcher and the coffeecounter girl standing together on that glassed-in patio, both of them sad. you keep wanting to go in there, to get a look at her, to somehow let her know that now you know who she is, but at the same time you are afraid to ever look her in the face again. you try to replay every exchange you’ve had with her in the last few weeks, but she is just the coffeecounter girl. it’s not like you’ve talked that much. and when you have she’s just been—nice. sweet. generous. taken interest in you, even. she must not—she can’t—know who you really are, or she’d’ve leapt across the counter long ago and slapped you across the face, ripped your eyeballs out, hurled a pot of hot coffee, driven you out of town. what was he doing here anyway—asking for her back? and why wouldn’t she take him, if she didn’t know? none of it adds up to anything easily understandable, so you’re stuck, waiting here in the car, until something becomes clear. but it never does. it just gets dark around you. and soon your phone rings and it’s mom wondering are you on your way, and you have to turn the ignition then. you have to pull out, head back home.

  what you don’t know might kill you #3

  you don’t know if the catcher told her. you don’t know if she knows who you are. you don’t know—not really—if ellen even knew the catcher was taken, and if she did you don’t know why she didn’t tell you about it. you don’t know why on earth he would have gone after you when he had a girl like her or what—at all—their relationship was like. you don’t even know really about any of the relationships you’ve had. you don’t know what will happen if you try to find out. you don’t know what you’re going to do after you graduate. you don’t even know what you’re doing for spring break. you don’t know if your friends really want you to go with them to the beach, or if they’re just saying that to be nice. you don’t know anymore what you really think of any of them—coffeecounter girl included—so you don’t know how to proceed, don’t know how to act. what you do know is that you’re tired of pretending you know everything when you don’t know anything. you know maybe now you’re ready to learn something new.

  Becca

  There Is Not Enough Weeping

  There is not enough weeping

  I can do

  to fill the channel between us

  and swim across.

  There is not enough weeping

  alone in the night

  to bring down the moon

  and place it in your hand.

  There is not enough weeping

  I can do

  to fill the channel between us

  and swim across.

  There is not enough weeping

  to drown out the sun,

  prevent another day from shining

  on your lonely face.

  There is not enough weeping

  I can do

  to fill the channel between us

  and swim across.

  Reanimation

  My phone for days has been

  a dead thing—

  a child’s dollhouse

  empty of dolls.

  Now tonight, nearly midnight,

  it leaps to life—a zombie corpse I’m afraid to touch,

  reanimated by his remorse.

  Not seventeen syllables this time,

  but simply the heaviest one:

  please.

  Effigy

  I sent a straw doll to school today

  instead of me.

  She can

  sit with Jenna and strum with grass fingers,

  croak out her dry laugh.

  Even her scarecrow brain will be better

  at answering my tests,

  though her handwriting is scratchy,

  and her stubby fingers

  can barely hold a pen.

  When Freya’s crow voice caws in her face

  wanting to know

  what’s wrong with her,

  —what’s happened—

  the red string smile

  I pressed between her cheeks

  will be all she has to give.

  She has just enough brains

  to call work at the last minute,

  fake a migraine, mumble sorry,

  though not quite enough sense

  to translate Margot’s curses

  spat just out of hearing.

  At the day’s end I can simply

  hang her out back,

  poke her with a stick

  —watch her twirl awhile.

  After an hour

  I will set her on fire,

  this grass girl becoming nothing

  but disappearing smoke.

  Absentminded

  Everyone’s leaning over a laptop,

  staring intently at the screen,

  learning about layout,

  uploading all our stories,

  and dropping them into place

  for the writer’s forum magazine.

  There’s a visiting guest

  teaching us the ropes,

  showing us about margins,

  choosing our fonts.

  He is tall and blond and his name is Lain

  and Sara’s so intwatulated

  she can barely sit still.

  This is what we’ve been working for,

  what I

  couldn’t wait to get to,

  but now they are all

  just goldfish in a bowl to me—

  a baseball game

  on TV

  with the sound down

  halfway through the sixth inning,

  and I don’t know who’s at bat.

/>   There is

  only one thing I see, everywhere—

  please.

  A Paralyzed Girl Doesn’t Flinch When She’s Kicked

  For days the numbness has entombed me

  —a mannequin marching

  in a life that was once mine—

  uncertain, undecided

  and decidedly unkempt.

  There is still

  a swath of cotton around my mouth,

  around my face,

  and three inches of thickness

  between me and the air.

  So it doesn’t hurt me

  —it doesn’t pierce—

  when I arrive the next time at work,

  and am called to the back—before clocking in.

  Emmett—Mr. Siegel—is here at his desk,

  and Margot is unable

  to look me in the eye.

  I am told I am

  let go.

  It’s not working out—

  I’m not taking this seriously, and there’re

  too many mistakes.

  They have covered my shift.

  I am free to go now.

  Here is a check

  for the days I’m still owed.

  He says thank you again,

  and that’s all there is.

  My spine has been severed

  so I can’t feel my legs

  as I walk out the door,

  and I can’t even turn

  to look back and wave.

  There’s nothing I hear,

  nothing I see,

  not even Nadia

  with her sorry good-bye.

  Aftershock

  For

  six

  whole

  minutes

  I

  can’t

  breathe.

  Head

  pressed

  to

  the

  steering

  wheel—

  crying

  so

  hard,

  my

  stomach

  comes

  up.

  Epiphany

  The fear is a force

  moving me home,

  driving me

  where I don’t want to go.

  I will have to tell Mom

  what happened today,

  and she will want to know why

  and I’ll have to explain.

  Explain how he showed up,

  how I’ve been making mistakes,

  how it’s been hard to focus

  with everything going on.

  I’m two paychecks away

  from paying back the car,

  the rest would be college—what I was going to save.

  I practice the answers:

  They just worked me too hard.

  What did they expect—

  I’m only in high school.

  And even in my ears—still stuffed with cotton—

  my voice is too tinny,