Heat Wave, 1995

by Sophia Starmack

That summer, Leah Goldstein wanted a ring, so she went out back
with a quarter and a spoon and her daddy’s hammer
and drove a square-headed nail through the belly of that coin
till she made a hole where her finger would fit
and she wore it like a wound the rest of that long hot year.

Our fifteenth birthday was brooding, poking its little bat-face
from under the edges of dusks that kept on falling. The tenth grade
threatened to electrify the world in the spit of its junk-food crust.
Sex kept driving its ramrod nail through everything—
In art class, we’d graduated to the extra-large tubes of paint,

the world was a Technicolor film we mixed ourselves
out of the black, cyan, magenta, yellow the teacher rationed out in dots.
I stood at my locker in a corduroy miniskirt, glazing my lips
with a coffee-colored pencil, shoving the forbidden books behind
my brown-bag covered texts. There was nothing in the one-room library

written after 1950, and the language I learned was equal parts
dominion and design. I kept drawing maps of the square-mile village,
trying to unravel the rope that tied me to myself like a misplaced itch
leads to a phantom limb. Leah was frying away summer
at the McDonald’s, burying my battered copy of Our Bodies Our Selves

beneath the wiggly baseboard under her bed. Down at the lake house
the drum majorette and I were strung in a nightgowned battle
of absence versus desire. Touch my scar, she’d say, raising
the hem of her T-shirt, and I never wanted anything so much
as to punch her in the face. America was playing on the drunken

wobble of her mama’s turntable, winding us round and around
the highways of lust on a nameless horse. Every time I touch you
it’s like you’ve died, she said, tracing a ring around my lips.
Then there was the scratch of silence, swallows striating the dawn,
and the long dry road back from where we’d begun.