First Love

Back when my hair barely covered my forehead
I was picking flowers in front of the gate.
You rode over…

Loved you since I was little, on the playground break-time
-brawled with you and your mismatched cuffs…

Ready to fly, my heart has been unbuckling
for a long time, waiting. When you finally

arrive, we are…

By Olive Franklin

You’ve never seen a lilac in Mississippi.
Backstage you wear lotion laced with
its chemical imitation. A ballet mistress
says relevé always as command: lift
onto the toe using only the heel.
Your ankle’s bewilderment
old as the horned owl gaze from
your mother hunched in the...

Twelve years old and lovesick, bumbling
and terrified for the first time in my life,
but strangely hopeful, too, and stunned,
definitely stunned—I wanted to cry,
I almost started to sob when Chris Klein
actually touched me—oh God—below the belt
in the back row of the...

The water was so still
            I believed it would keep us
                        right-side up forever
there in that pool
            on a night so dim
                        it looked like the negative
of itself, with the friend
            I loved in high school,
                        a boy (I thought
they were a boy) who
            had also shed
                        their...

I am warned against marrying
early love. I am also told
it works out, sometimes,

for saplings can be braided like hair.
We will bend and grow together
while the centuried oaks at Toomer’s Corner

hollow, and the college tree poisoner
brags on the radio. Your ring...

Under the sagging clotheslines of crepe paper
By the second string of teachers and wallflowers
In the school gym across the key through the glitter   
Of mirrored light three-second rule forever   
Suspended you danced with her the best slow dancer   
Who stood on tiptoe who...

i.

i am sitting in sunday school
in a handsewn pink dress and white lace tights

i am putting my hand down when we
learn about david and jonathan

i am not asking if  king david was bi
i am taking communion

i am bowing my head...

Here you are forty years
later in a white coat
examining my ears.
 
All I can think
is how your tongue once
turned in the tunnel
 
you're peering into.  The
fault is not in my ears,
but between them!
 
No one can see that far.
But could we gaze back
through...

i. “I am the sign of the Letter, / . . .”

No seed. Flat beneath my hand:
bone. Pelvis a field, but no seed.
Because there was no punishment
like fucking, its whip burned
Adam and nothing after. Because
shine took flight like two parrots
so...

     lady in brown 
de library waz right down from de trolly tracks
cross from de laundry-mat
thru de big shinin floors & granite pillars
ol st. louis is famous for
i found toussaint
but not til after months uv
cajun katie/ pippi longstockin
christopher robin/ eddie...

I remember that first time:
the empty auditorium, her voice,
the dark all around us,
her mouth reaching into mine.
She was Freddy’s foxy older sister,
and I didn’t know why
she wanted to kiss me. She
had already finished high school
and probably shouldn’t have
been walking the...

It seems insane now, but
she’d be standing soaked
in schoolday morning light,
her loose-leaf notebook,
flickering at the bus stop,
and we almost trembled
 
at the thought of her mouth
filled for a moment with both
of our short names. I don’t know
what we saw when we...

At the high school football game, the boys
stroke their new muscles, the girls sweeten their lips
with gloss that smells of bubblegum, candy cane,
or cinnamon. In pleated cheerleader skirts
they walk home with each other, practicing yells,
their long bare legs forming in...

I will not speak ill of Jack Flick.
I will rarely look
at the scar he made on my cheek
one summer at the lake.

I won't speak ill of Jack whose freckles
and gangly legs are gone.
So is the drained face I saw when...

My father built a great worry around me like a dock
Once I left it before I was finished
And he remained with his great, empty worry.
And my mother—like a tree on the shore
Between her arms outstretched for me.

And in '31 my...

When I was one-and-twenty
       I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
       But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
       But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
       No use to talk to me.

When I was...

Because this song’s made of the airwaves
a time machine, you start to play the air
guitar of memory, making a country
so you can walk back into it, like a man
on rewind in a silent film, his whiskey tumbler
filling up again as...