By: Christina Litchfield
cheerleader
all those fine words you sing beneath the field bleachers where you tease the dirty blonde girls
there is supposed to be something sacred in between the sentences that build the chants uplifting the crowd
and I am meant to translate, to take the shit that you divulge while you cum and turn it into something beautiful
something to be remembered something worth repeating in rhymes or line breaks or whatever
fuck you I had your rhythm before you popped that mint gum in the morning
go on, dare you try to take me while I swallow everything you have and leave
you with Nothing.
baby’s breath
the house is black almost
rushing water, a footstep, words
ping silent in the middle of
what was commanded and what
was received
they don't do what you tell them to
anymore
I run a tight ship you say
tell yourself keep telling yourself
get lost in the telling
he hollowed out
your heart with a fist
and holes are hard to fill
with mouths sucking oxygen
the rock and the hard place
don't matter when
flames need air to burn
out
the spaces in between
hag
youth never held me like it should beautiful before knowing what beauty was
now shuffling boots in the aftermath turning over what was good
marks stretch across the curved belly of before I lived
they keep telling me I can’t write poetry for who I was
and I keep scratching an epitaph for
who I am
Christina Litchfield is a third-year PhD English - Creative Writing student at Binghamton University. She also teaches first-year writing at Arizona State online. In her supposed free time, she juggles nine spirited kids with the help of a wonderful husband who maintains her sanity to the best of his ability.
"It's amazing what the appearance of a new little laugh line can do. Straight from the mirror to the laptop, I wrote 'cheerleader' as a bitter throwback to those glorious-terrible teenage days, deep in feminine objectification but at least wrinkle-free. I just so happened to be writing at the tail-end of my kids' bedtime routine, in that moment when it should be quiet, but it isn't, not quite. And 'baby's breath' arrived as a temperamental ode to motherhood that is no longer shiny and new. Once the house truly was silent and I contemplated the two new poems and the uphill battle ahead to get them published, that wrinkle started twitching and 'hag' was born, kicking and screaming all the way. Three poems, three life stages that women know all too well."
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