{"id":1893,"date":"2018-05-07T15:55:15","date_gmt":"2018-05-07T15:55:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/?page_id=1893"},"modified":"2018-05-07T15:59:11","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T15:59:11","slug":"starmack","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/starmack\/","title":{"rendered":"Starmack"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t4X2\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/h1>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\tan online poetry journal\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/h2>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\tHeat Wave, 1995\t\t\t\t\t<\/h5>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
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by Sophia Starmack<\/em><\/p>

\n<\/p>

<\/span>\n<\/p>

That summer, Leah Goldstein wanted a ring, so she went out back
with a quarter and a spoon and her daddy\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/span>\n

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\u2014
In art class, we\u2019d graduated to the extra-large tubes of paint,<\/p>

\n<\/span>\n<\/p>

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<\/p>

\n<\/span>\n<\/p>

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\u2019s, burying my battered copy of Our Bodies Our Selves<\/em><\/p>

\n<\/span>\n<\/p>

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\u2019d 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<\/p>

\n<\/span>\n<\/p>

wobble of her mama\u2019s turntable, winding us round and around
the highways of lust on a nameless horse. Every time I touch you
it\u2019s like you\u2019ve died<\/em>, 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\u2019d begun.<\/p>\n

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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<\/em>, was published in 2015. She is the Writing Coordinator at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.<\/p>\n<\/span>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s hammer and drove a square-headed nail through the belly of that coin till she made a hole where her finger would fit and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"full-width-page.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1893","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1893"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1903,"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1893\/revisions\/1903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}