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Blockbuster Video was wine for us then. The sun would go down. Mom would come home. Wash your hands, wipe the dirt off, get in the van. The anticipation of those 8 minutes. The arguing before we even reached the door. Then the unearthly fluorescent glow. The smell of the foam one sprays on carpet before they vacuum. The giggles of teens hustling fondles in Romantic Comedies. Men we’d see tomorrow on the sidelines of the soccer field gripping DVDS with X’s over chests like ladders that fall from helicopters.
I remember the netherworld of selection: tweenhood. Aged out of cartoons, too young for the real scary stuff, we still loved the Horror isles. All the glossy, popping, beautiful eyes of the women on the covers screaming. All the many severed legs and feet with red, manicured toes. The distinct feeling, for now I’ll watch this PG13 stuff, but soon, soon I’ll be old enough to watch women, like me, get chopped.
Metamorphic
We loved our boys
who bought us our
favorite Wine Black
and Milds.
We loved our boys
with droopy ear
gauges and eyebrow
barbells who electric
taped our senior
portraits to sun visors
in their two-toned
Jeeps.
We loved our boys
making out around
Tak Lake, Turkish
Golds in ballast
between their
industrials and flat
brims like
Montblancs, who put
Xanax on our tongues
the way you turn off a
light.
We loved our boys
sipping Arizona Ice Tea
Tall Boys they
recycled as dip-spit
spittoons.
We loved our boys
hot boxing blunts
down haunted roads,
subwoofer blaring,
one hand on the wheel
the other nudging our
french-braided heads
towards the zippers
on their brother’s old
jeans, who spiked the
soda so we’d let them
put it in our butts later.
We sure loved our
boys who peed in the
beds
we shared on nights it
took all of us to plop
them down, whose
chests recalled the
Rock Cycle of sixth
grade science infamy.
We loved our boys
who who snot-sobbed
between declarations
of innocence, who
came in our eyes and
on our stomachs, who
begged for nudes,
one painted finger on our
vulvas like a doorbell,
whose mothers knew
the color of our
thongs by the way we
said how are you.
We loved our boys
who wantonly
clutched all our
jiggling, jegging
water beds; our boys
shared so nicely.
We loved our boys
who knelt in the street
for flip-phone photos,
who snapped our
breasts when we’d
fall asleep cause
sometimes we had to
go home.
We loved our boys,
their blunt snouts and
slender bodies the
salamanders of our sheets.
We loved our boys
who followed us to
the outhouse, pushed
us up against the tree.
We loved our boys
who never meant to
hurt us, whose whole
worlds were us, who
would blame us in
their notes if we ever
—
listen,
we loved our boys
and our boys loved us.
Grace Dilger is a poet, educator, and MFA candidate at Stony Brook University. Her work has been featured in Peach Fuzz Magazine, The Southampton Review, The Brooklyn Quarterly, Grody Mag, and the forthcoming issue of Southeast Missouri University Press’s Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Vol. 9.