July Westhale
You left the door agape as a mouth, met me
in the middle of the road. Car red
as a throat, your hair on my tongue, your breasts
on my breasts—I hardly cry, but your body
never disappoints. Even as friends—what my father
always called you. Fathers
never realize the gay they teach their girls:
how to love a curled lip in snarl, belt
a belt low on the hips, leave without saying goodbye.
Alternate ending: you have babies and they look
like the two dead siblings killed by cars.
One died during High Holidays, so it was days
before you could bury him. You liked
ritual slow. You’d be a tortoise at any end. A constant
widow, wailing at the wall, a mother
at the Plaza de Mayo, begging “bring back our boys.”
As if orgasm erases everything that came before.
As if it’s that easy. You’d hate me for writing this.
Forgive me. I’ve failed, or triumphed. Most don’t stay
around to figure it out—I have no legend.
Alternate ending: we grow old, and we do everything
we said we’d do, on a dock in Michigan, years ago.
The lie of sun in our hair, the lie of youth
before we were afraid of the sun.
July Westhale is the award-winning author of Trailer Trash (selected for the 2016 Kore Press Book Prize), The Cavalcade, and Occasionally Accurate Science. Her most recent poetry can be found in The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, Rappahannock Review, Tupelo Quarterly, RHINO, Lunch Ticket, and Quarterly West. Her essays have been nominated for Best American Essays and have appeared in McSweeney’s, Autostraddle, and The Huffington Post. She is the 2018 University of Arizona Poetry Center Fellow. www.julywesthale.com
