Making It Up - Poem

Literary Review, Summer, 2000 by Nancy Naomi Carlson

   I can't be sure of my childhood street,
   once as familiar as my old room
   or the number of houses passed to reach the corner.
   The crossing guard's name can't be retrieved,
   nor the charm bracelet I gave away
   to a friend who moved to the Bronx.
   I can't remember if her name was Elsie or Marie,
   or if the skirt she wore was white--
   its meaning impenetrable.
   Was the sky clear or clouded into the shape of a broken wing?
   The words exchanged are gone,
   but I remember my mother's blame:
   Never give away what you can't get back.

   Virginity, for instance:
   the theme that snaked its way
   into my adolescent thoughts--
   a stream into which I dangled a line
   that might hook something
   too big to be dealt with,
   or so wriggly it might slip away.
   My friends showed off hickies, like trophies,
   while I shrank into my turtleneck
   and made up back seat stories of double dates,
   and fingers that had been around.
   I tried on cigar bands and pop-top rings
   to see how they suited my left hand
   waved in a flourish before a mirror,
   and practiced writing Mrs. Ringo Start
   in honeymoon-pink pens
   bought at the five and dime.

   I imagined making it for the first time
   in the bed of a Ford pickup truck
   with a guy from the Lazy Boy Lounge,
   a tattoo on his arm swirled into a heart
   holding Mom. Or with a hippie
   in a waterbed, our bodies stirring up
   waves that countered my weight,
   that seemed to pull me in,
   breaking my concentration to match his breath,
   leaving me so breathless and confused
   I had to ask if it was over.
   Another version placed me
   in the bridal suite at the New York Hilton,
   netted in white, eyes closed,
   gold band on my left fourth finger.
   He with matching ring carried me
   across the threshold to a bed made up
   in white Victorian lace,
   mints in gold foil on the pillow--
   the version I would save for my daughter.

Nancy Naomi Carlson's collection, Kings Highway, was published by the Washington Writers Publishing House in 1997; her work has appeared in Poetry, Ascent, and Praise Schooner