Bibbe Hansen
When I was 14,
I was in Catholic school
I hear the echo
of my fringed Swedish clogs
clunking, mulelike
on the hall floors,
pushing past the seniors
on my way to the eternal fluorescence
of the avocado green cafeteria
the hem
of my polyester uniform skirt
catches
on an open locker,
then there was
laughter
of older worldly girls,
hair-sprayed deities
reeking of Marlboro reds
Heaven Scent perfume
and sticky strawberry
Maybelline Kissing Potion lipgloss
those divinely formed girls
knew the secrets
that could only be learned
in the back seats of parked Camaros
at 2 am on Cove Island beach
sacred
sacrosanct
until the Jordache jeans peeled off
Bibbe, I imagine
what was it like to be you
when you were 14
blonde baby delinquent
wandering Manhattan
on your Saturday ritual visits to galleries,
eating blinis with Warhol and Edie
long bangs obscuring your eyes,
but you watched and listened,
smiled and danced
and pranced in white go-go boots
down dirty midtown streets
shuffling off to Buffalo
or someplace
where I wished I could have been
*
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, Anti-Heroin Chic, SWWIM, Crow & Cross Keys, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women and Fast Famous Women (Woodhall Press).
