Starmack

4X2

an online poetry journal

  • 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.

Sophia Starmack received an MA in French and Francophone literature from Bryn Mawr College, and an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Her poetry chapbook, The Wild Rabbit, was published in 2015. She is the Writing Coordinator at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.