girlhood
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after we emptied the house of men
we let the curtains grow dirty and tore numbered pages off the wall I carried a stick Heather a brush we ripened in our weeks-worn swimsuits and sucked our mouths raw with fireballs on the most special night of the year we’d get port wine cheese from Kroger’s and make a pallet on the floor lock the door dip our fingers into mother’s Fuzzy Navel as Miss North Carolina floated from one side of the stage to the other she was our dream one day we too could have a safety-pinned sash and talent shaved legs hope we would be far away so grown and loved |
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Nicole Callihan writes poems and stories. Her poetry books include SuperLoop (2014) and Translucence (co-written with Samar Abdel Jaber, 2018) and the chapbooks A Study in Spring (co-written with Zoe Ryder White, 2015), The Deeply Flawed Human (2016), Downtown (2017), and Aging (2018). Her novella, The Couples, was published by Mason Jar Press in summer 2019. Learn more at www.nicolecallihan.com.