A Former Mean Girl Contemplates Her Life from the Parking Lot of a Strip Mall
I tug back the blank drapes
of memory from the rear-view mirror
of my hail-dented black Mitsubishi SUV–
which is in serious need of a wash
and interior cleaning.
What remains?
Two Minnesota winters
of road salt and gravel,
McDonald’s receipts,
three dimes, a quarter,
and some pennies in the console.
K-Mart winter boots,
a box of office things
from a job I was fired from
18 months ago
two coats (winter and spring),
jumper cables,
and unreturned library books
strewn on the back seat.
I look hard in the tilted mirror.
I have the same green eyes
I always had, the identical
double chin I teased my mother about
when I was 20.
In the parking lot of the Family Dollar
I remember friends
I am no longer friends with.
We were all bridesmaids
in each other’s weddings,
all of us shackled before the age of 24.
So much pink taffeta, blonde hair
and chocolate-covered strawberries
served on Royal Doulton dishes
should not be allowed to exist.
I am ashamed.
Ashamed of flicking cigarette ashes on fat girls,
scrawling graffiti on Jill’s dorm room door
because she smiled at my boyfriend,
snickering behind a pink manicured hand
at Tracy in her cheap dress with her acne scars
who tried way too hard to draw attention
to herself while dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
But really, I dug through the sofa
for spare change to do my laundry,
ate canned chili from a hot pot–
Small hands crumbling saltine crackers
over the warm Sunday night meal,
reading Dickens and Plath,
curled under my tartan quilt.
These green eyes remember
sinking shiny pink pedicured toes
into the sand of a Connecticut beach
I once called home—
Crab cakes and lobster,
a Polish lady who came weekly
to clean my home.
Today I will seek redemption
*
Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she was awarded the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, look for her work in the Eunoia Review, Rust and Moth, The New York Quarterly, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women and Fast Famous Women (Woodhall Press).