Coronado, CA 1979

Everything about the day screams
summer. The bus fare I stole
to get home spent on a cherry
Slurpee at 7-Eleven. Skin and hair
caked with sand and salt. Swimsuit
still damp with seawater, soaked through
t-shirt, cut-off shorts. Cars loaded with
other people’s sun-stroked children roar
past my outstretched arm.

I remember it all. The way his sedan slowed
along the edge of the highway. How I sprinted
towards the only open door I saw. The way I braced
my bare feet against the dashboard. The angle
of my legs making a drawbridge between my body
and his car. The man driving – whatever his name –
is unimportant.

What matters, forty-three years later
I can still feel the sting of the hot leather
seat scorching the backs of my thighs.
As though, the car had been sitting in the sun
all day. As if, the man had been waiting
for me to finish swimming.

There must have been something
so feral in me that I could get in a car
with a stranger. How I wasn’t even afraid,
until he stopped in the middle of an overpass
and said, Get out before I do something
to you that both of us will regret.

*

Michel O’Hara is a poet and photographer living in Los Angeles, CA. She is currently completing her B.A. in Liberal Studies, Creative Writing at Antioch University Los Angeles. Currently she is an editor at the literary journal Two Hawks Quarterly.