Poetry: The Last Summer of Innocence by Zoë Fay-Stindt

We called it doctor, husband and wife.

The rules—only medics and men

 

pry girls open—meant that within

these mores, we were safe.

 

We could poke and rub and splay

and not have to reckon with ourselves,

 

explain our hours-long naps in the old

stone oven, justify the pop-ups flooding

 

the screen we forgot to clear or the secrets

scribbled on berry-scented Diddl paper.

 

I can still remember our own tart smell,

summer souring us, those drink stirrers we pulled

 

from Shirley Temples and mint diabolos

to sound our waters, the gummy traces

 

we left behind. Then, too soon,

my hair started coming in dark

 

and Sara told me I was lucky though all I felt

was a welt of exhaustion, alien

 

from myself. I was the pack leader,

newfound red. We were still finger-painting

 

my bathroom walls: Alice + Frank encircled

in a thick and clumsy blue heart, a small swift trapped

 

in her nest above the trash can. By the time I started shaving

even Mom would say I could have done a better job

 

after my first attempt on top of the toilet with a dry razor

and cheap cream, red bumps blooming, everything impossible.

 

It was the summer I’d crouch next to the vent in the hallway

so I could breathe cool air, long after I’d stopped running naked

 

through the water sprinkler when the girls

called me gay at my birthday sleepover,

 

the summer Ashley chased me around the room

with an open stapler, shooting, or clamping

 

the hot straightener down on my ear

if I fidgeted during date night groomings.

 

By the time I came back to France the next year,

we were splitting loves in sleeping bags

 

at the edge of the red lake, had subbed the boys in for each other

and though I was still famished we’d never talk about it,

 

I the shameful leader of our trespasses, horrified

at my own appetite, blooming predator.

 

That summer I was so anxious to escape

my quiet kitchen with my tired mother

 

and gone dad, our too-yellow egg salad.

I was always calling out into their garden

 

from my window, Are you done

eating? Can I come over?