Denise is scribbling this word
on her calendar
in the box for July twenty-second.

I don’t know what it means.

It sounds like the name
of some Greek or Roman queen,
or like one of those countries in Asia
that I can never remember on my geography tests.

I ask Denise, but she pretends she doesn’t hear me
and sings loudly along with “People Got to Be Free,”
which is playing on WABC,
while she gets dressed
in the layers of gauze she calls a shirt,
a too-long macramé belt, and a skirt
that’s so short
you could mistake it for a headband.

Tonight she’s meeting Harry Keating
and a bunch of his friends
so they can plan
a peace rally with the students in Princeton.
(That I’d like to see … the young geniuses of America
taking orders from Denise
and a bunch of amateur disk jockeys.)

When she leaves, I find Mom’s old dictionary
and look up euphoria.
It says: “rapture,” “ecstasy,” “joy,”
which can only mean one of two things:

a. Denise plans to leave us that day and join some flower-child commune.

b. Blues goddess Janis is performing somewhere near us.

Sadly, my money’s on Janis.