Play Clothes
The old days of the old clothes—those summers
when we grew out of pants before they wore out,
barely noticing what was draped over our bodies
until our mother realized that the tight shorts
had morphed into booty shorts and they vanished
from the drawer. How many summers
did that red and white sundress last?
It was my mother’s before it was mine,
sewed from a feedsack in 1945
and tough as pig iron. Slipped over
underpants and nothing else, on a sultry
morning in August, bare feet
in dew grass, sneaking Fanta at 8 a.m.
out of sight of the disapprovers, my sister
in cutoffs scratching a tunnel among rosebushes,
the two of us acting out cowboys on a rotting wagon,
founding a nation of hay bales. And still
my thoughts are streaked with grass stains
and mud puddles and the prickers of blackberries
and poison ivy, acres of it, and cow shit, and at night
the wistful scent of Lucky Strikes and Miller
High Life floats across the firefly hill, among
the murmured conversations of the uncles,
reek of old dog, porkchop grease wiped
on a cherry-stained shirt—the indifferent
beauty of dirt, everything worn out, almost gone: gone.
[forthcoming in Calendar (Deerbrook Editions, 2024)]
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