Blake Jett in his stripped-down Ford
could roar off with the loose girls. We
walked, cradling Western civilization
in hardback against our breasts.
We were the smart track, and we knew it.
In gym class and homeroom, they
mixed everything up like democracy,
but we knew their signs.
We gave them blue ink, wide
margins, engravable words.
Yet one by one, we came into our hormones,
plebeian as Kotex. Under our skirts,
the bulge of equipment, buried like sin.
Voluminous notes were exchanged on the matter.
Nina Spalding’s tight skirts risked
as much as our parents warned, and
overnight, she was gone, with her stomach.
Ricky and Elvis conflicted down our bulletin boards,
a plain philosophical choice: country-club white
or the deep rumble from the edge of black.
A person could settle for anything.
The school could blow up, the town, the USA.
A person could go crazy with waiting.
After school, a person could take a certain bus,
to sit with a certain boy, and leave
her arrogant friends to walk.
Down the hillside,
the ribbon of buses was always numbered.
Inside, their handrails worn to steel,
the wounds of their gray seats picked bare.
Soon the drivers would grind their motors
one after the other
and roll their yellow machines downhill
until they broke away like pollen.