All About It

Mary Crockett Hill

 

He looked like sullied laundry, which is to say

Jeff Clark, which is to say the scrubby field

where Jeff Clark took me when I was 5 and he 13

to teach me, as he put it, how to hump.

 

Jeff didn’t take my clothes off, or his for that matter,

or stick any one of his parts into any one of mine.

He just led me out into the first light of November

where even I suspected we should not have come.

 

He said, “I bet you don’t know anything,” and I told him

“I know all about it,” and he said, “Show me then.”

So I did to him what my brother had described.

It must have looked ridiculous — this thin-boned child

 

in wrinkled corduroys and mittens, pumping

her intrepid hips against the dawn of 1975.

I know it is wrong for me to smile when thinking on it.

But it is my memory. I can smile if I want.


Mary Crockett Hill lives and works in southwestern Virginia.  She is the author of If You Return Home with Food (Bluestem Press, 1998), winner of the Bluestem Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in American Poetry: The Next Generation, Poetry Daily, Boston Review, River Styx, and Pleiades.   

 

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