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August 02, 2006

When They Are Older They Will Pass This Place In Their Cars and It Will Seem Smaller and Boxier

Heather Rounds

Behind Hocking Valley's Rollerama the flimsy girls hunch firmly over bucket sized slurpees flavored with Absolute. They’re lined up like pigeons, curbside, and something leads one to say, "what's done is done" and they let out sleepy laughs and the sound makes its way down the alley, out into the thick fried air where a hemi engine revs and the fuzzy thumps of car speakers vibrate the June parking lot.

They are made from fathers who’d call this anything but music and mothers who just hate the noise because none of it is theirs.

The evening is turning to night and the clouds dim purple and endlessly move like wrinkles of lingerie and outside the Rollerama there are pearls and whistles falling from baggies, there are things shaken not stirred, things that dangle loose from the neck, flush as pompoms, things that tunnel up and jump off the tongue, things that unbuckle when least expected

and the slippery surface goes pounding and pounding.

Behind the girls, the exit sign of the building sluggishly blinks, green and malfunctioning and one's got a c-shaped scar on her belly and it's slipping from her shirt, one's got silver lips, the third’s scraping the curb with a quarter she's found and the fourth is flailing her arms at the sight of her boyfriend who’s just appeared out of no where--a tenuous expression under a stiff red cap. The girls rise from the curb quickly and if it wasn't for all the noise you would hear the swish of hot blood in their bodies and see the scars fly up easy as wasps.

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Heather has a handmade chapbook out these days. Interested? Email her at:
secondbed at yahoo dot com

Posted by Rock Heals at August 2, 2006 04:30 AM