Poetry |

“This Summer the Girls” & “Relics of the Mountain West”

This Summer the Girls

 

 

This summer the girls are all wearing blue

fingernail polish, looking as if they’ve drowned

or suffocated, or been poisoned by carbon

monoxide. As if they’re trying on for size

death. Nail polish, too, is one-

size-fits-all.

 

This summer the girls have all dyed their hair

silver. Or gray. ‘Just to see how it looks — after all,

we won’t live to see old age — have you seen

the state of the planet?’ ‘Not natural?’ they laugh

at their mothers. ‘Your generation will

tell us about natural?’

 

This summer the girls have noticed summer never

ending. This summer the ending has not

noticed the girls. For the first time ever, the ending

has not noticed the girls. Because there is no ending.

Because there are no girls.

Or won’t be.

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

Relics of the Mountain West

 

 

One summer we hauled the deer antlers my brother found in the grass-

lands, from campsite to campsite, state to state, each morning

balancing them carefully atop stacked sleeping bags as we broke

camp, each night lowering them under the parked van till first light.

 

Another summer atop those same sleeping bags we carefully slid

each morning an ornate mid-19th century mirror my mother’s distant

cousin had given her as we passed through, a looking glass left behind

by their shared ancestor, daughter of a prophet anointed after a prior

 

prophet was martyred by a mob. Once we bore our relics safely home

we should have hung the mirror and the antlers on opposite walls,

so they could have beheld and reflected one another,

making a kind of infinity mirror, a time lapse of what heads are

 

valued for, killed for. Instead, the antlers went in my brother’s room,

the mirror hung in the living room for years before we noticed along its border

the stems of the carved flowers hovered above their buds. We had been

looking in the mirror upside down, imagining our ancestors peering back

 

levelly, when instead they would have been trapezing from the ceiling,

shoulders funneling into necks, heads hanging as though overloaded with invisible

antlers or deadweight halos, and capsized. We agreed that we liked the mirror

that way, and never righted it. It hangs upended still in my parents’ living

 

room, an observance somewhere between heir and error.        

Contributor
Jessica Goodfellow

Jessica Goodfellow’s poetry collections are Whiteout (University of Alaska Press, 2017), Mendeleev’s Mandala, and The Insomniac’s Weather Report. A former writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve, she has published poems in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Scientific American, Verse Daily, Motionpoems, and Best American Poetry. Jessica lives and works in Japan.

Posted in Poetry

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.