Fast Girls

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The three sisters across the street

live with their divorced mama.

They wear cool outfits,

flipping long ironed hair over shoulders deceptively delicate.

They invite boys in,

making no apologies for being female

and thus drawn to narrow hipped boys

with supercilious eyes;

boys who drive fast cars,

and crack gum and knuckles;

boys who don’t mean any harm, they just long to feel skin on skin

and the vibrating roar of their suburban chariots beneath their perfect rumps.

At thirteen I watch all this wistfully from my picture window,

absorbing like a sponge every nuance of flirty expression—

for oh, I am desperate to learn what it means to be female—

loving the lazy way these girls walk up the drive

the casual wave, half turning, sending All-American boys

back home for the night to aproned mothers doting on their every word,

mothers who love their sons supremely and wouldn’t guess
the power these girls have over them.

The sisters don’t bother flipping off their porch light when they come straggling in after curfew.

Probably they sneak out later while the naive neighborhood sleeps, and the air is so gripping it makes you gasp;

Probably they meet the kinds of boys after midnight which even they are not bold enough

to bring home by light of day:

The black leather coated ones

cigarettes dangling from mouths so profane all the adults want to smack them,

knock them into next week:

These insolent ones whose souls are brittle,

slicked back like their hair.

And what of these girls who stalk them with barely contained idolatry?

They are born to this sharing of furtive smoking, and secrets

with the wrong kinds of boys,

to backseat fumblings and feigned intimacies,

Laughing at the thought of getting caught

or of old age having the crust to mess with them some day.

But look at them traipsing home through hushed neighborhood

their porch light a feckless beacon;

I imagine them one-two-three

blinking in surprise at a sudden tightening of the throat

from the mere sight of that feeble light
signaling them back to the safety of pink bedrooms and canopied beds.

They will never be so innocent again

They will never retrieve what they so recklessly gave away,

but they will spend the rest of their lives trying.

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