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We were in high school, so we’d fuck in her grandmother’s Crown Vic. Her head resting on the armrest. My foot flat on floorboards for leverage. She told her grandmother she spilled ice cream and stained the blue bench seat. We’d fuck after school in the computer lab. The teacher packing his briefcase would say, “Turn off the lights and lock the door when you finish your assignments.” And we did. Rug burns in the dark. The janitor’s keys jangled down the hall on the other side of the locked door. We’d fuck in a rehearsal space in the band room. Thrust in rhythm to Sean Murphy next door, practicing eighth notes on his trombone. We’d fuck in my father’s waterbed and on her sister’s ruffled-fringed twin. We’d force her teddy bear to bear witness to our acrobatic deviance.
Summer arrived. We’d fuck in a field surrounded by white pines. The giant evergreens stood shoulder to shoulder, and when a breeze swam through their branches, they’d drone like druids. During heat waves, we’d fuck in the lake while kids dove off a pier across the cove. I still say the pasty, freckled kid knew what we were up to by how he smirked.
What love thrived in this jungle of sweat and smile was a love we knew wouldn’t last. By September, she’d head off to culinary school in Boston, and I’d go to college further west. But until we slashed and crossed that date off the calendar, we’d fuck throughout July and August. We fucked in a forest while mosquitoes sucked blood out of our asses. We fucked in a dome tent at a music festival while others sang Grateful Dead tunes around a campfire. We fucked in an abandoned camper parked beside a dilapidated house that had on its porch a refrigerator.
The last time I saw her, she stopped at my dad’s—the old Crown Vic’s backseat crammed with her stuff. She wanted to return my sweatshirt, which I told her to keep. We small-talked our goodbyes and used our sneakers to scribble in the dirt. I watched her pull away. Her right blinker blew kisses as she took the corner.
My father bumped into her a few years later; she was back for her grandmother’s funeral. She asked about me, jotted her email on scrap paper, but I never shot her a message. We found each other when our loneliness craved to be lonely with another. When teen angst had the urge to yank innocence’s hair, talk dirty in its ear. Some memories are best left as unmade beds. Sometimes my mind lies on its back in that summer field, where our bodies were a tangle of milky blue under a white moon. Her head on my chest. My fingers ran through her wildflower curls. She used to tell everyone her eyes were brown, but I see their complex hues even in time’s weak light. I know they’re hazel.
About JOSHUA MICHAEL STEWART
Joshua Michael Stewart is the author of Break Every String, The Bastard Children of Dharma Bums, and Love Something. His work has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Salamander, Plainsongs, Brilliant Corners, South Dakota Review, Permafrost, and many others. He lives in Ware, Massachusetts. There’s a fearlessness in Joshua Michael Stewart's collection Break Every String.-- tough, tightly written narratives and monologues about living poor with broken people (some of whom are your closest relatives) in hard times. This heartfelt gritty work reminds me of the hardscrabble accounts of humanity in some of our best poets-- the work of Ai, Bruce Weigel, and Linda McCarriston's landmark book, Eva-Marie. Stewart exercises the courage of truth telling and takes the revenge of real poetic craft. As Bruce Weigel says "Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what." Or as Stewart says, "Poets are the battered spouses of hope." You can't help but respect the maker of these streamlined vehicles, for his guts and his unsentimental, vivid poems. -Tony Hoagland
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