Oneida Lake, 1977
- Jun 28, 2024
- 1 min read
by Hope Jordan
Somewhere Tom Petty’s American Girl still plays on endless loop and me and Kim walk in adolescent lockstep, tug our terrycloth shorts to cover our butts. Love’s Baby Soft and Coppertone coconut, lemon scent of Sun-In on our hair. We still count the cars with men who whistle as we walk over the bridge. Somewhere there’s still sand in a transistor radio and boys who want to talk to us, inflated inner tubes tied to the dock. Back at Grandma’s I’m still so skinny you can see my ribs in last year’s red-white-and-blue bikini, lying in the inner tube holding a Pepsi on my belly, umbilical nylon rope anchors me to the dock, the dock anchors water to shore, lawn chairs to mother, aunts, my grandparents’ picnic table, ashtrays full.
Hope Jordan’s work appears most recently in Cutleaf, Hole in the Head Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Stone Canoe. She grew up in Chittenango, NY, holds a dual BA from Syracuse & an MFA in Creative Writing from UMass Boston. She lives in NH, where she was the state’s first official poetry slam master. Her chapbook is The Day She Decided to Feed Crows.
