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I don’t believe in girlhood. I don’t believe

we are ever small, or ever don’t know what it is

we shouldn’t know. I don’t believe thick minutes in July

crept any closer to the ground than on the tennis court

at Hidden Creek Country Club, where sky-browned Tony

with eyebrows bleached bright from the sun, strapped me

at the end of our lesson into an elastic harness

anchored by the chain link fence, net running across the court

like a hard spine, my sisters on the other side, and

Eyebrows on his knees, adult arms around me, taking as long as he wanted

to snap the clasps in place. He’d back up, yell

Serve! to Meggie or Neena and I ran to them,

slapped backward by its quick yank

at my waist and home later, Meggie, four years younger

so I guess she was seven, says Courtney, Tony has a cwush on you—said it

in that lisp of hers we laughed about

two days ago watching home footage, our mother behind the camera

laughing too, our mother like a shapely soda bottle

with lipstick at the rim, our mother who played Patsy Cline so often

that there Meggie was, singing Cway-thee, eyes nuclear

and luminous, never breaking contact with the camera. We do nothing now

but sing it like she did then. Play it in the morning

on our way to summer jobs at the Club, where she flips burgers

by the pool and I bring beer around to golfers

wearing left-handed gloves that hide their wedding rings.

Every time I pass the cabana, Meggie’s bent over the counter texting

her boyfriend in a boxy uniform she calls unsexy

as hell, thank God, and every time I leave her it’s to bend into

the cart to find a Modelo for Mr. Richards who likes

my little shorts, he says, who likes sunflower seeds, spitting

them diagonally between sentences, who calls me best

in the business, says, we were all talkin ‘bout you today, ‘bout how

you know the rules so well, meaning I’m quiet, unlike

Barbara, who wears khaki pants and drives her cart

like a demon banshee in heat, plowin’ right up there when we’re teein’ off,

and between the 12^th and 13^th hole I drive the path

along that tennis court where even at eleven I was barely

there, my ribcage the circumference of a Folgers coffee tin

and Tony was lifting my shirt to put his hand

on the harness’ angry red marks, asking if it hurt, and no,

I’d say, it feels like nothing, it felt like nothing at all.

pa is from Virginia and holds an MFA from Columbia University. Her poetry has received awards and distinctions from Best New Poets, Poets & Writers Magazine, Rattle, The Atlantic, North American Review, and elsewhere.

They must bear no stain,
they must come perfect

from the dryer–cotton
fresh from Turkey, bright

olive stripes, or amber
ones, or blue.  They must bear

no crease, must take the folds
from my hands obediently,

tags tucked underneath them
like the legs of calves,

as meek as sheep.  They
must limn the linen chest like poppies,

coral and gold, or else the pale green I like
in bowls of roses on the table, or

the blue of hydrangeas, a bit
mysterious, shadowing the wood

when I open the doors.  They must
conform, conform now to my vision

of perfection, because my father
would wipe himself with one

when he was done with me,
and I remember.  Love,

when I see you again,
will you forgive my trespasses?

I am hell to live with for a reason.

Robin Kozak was born in Chicago, Illinois and grew up in Wyomissing, a bedroom community outside Reading, Pennsylvania.  She received degrees from Ohio University and the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, and her poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Field, The Gettysburg Review, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Witness, and other publications.  An authority on antique and estate jewelry, she has also recently completed a novel, The Kingdom It Would Be. 

When La Llorona met Billy the Kid in the trenches of the Cimarron canyon, the world was black with smokestacks, burning as buildings became tumbleweeds. The scars of the trees were brighter than the mountains, now rounded hills of charcoal and we were all mountain men, bleary-eyed and mad with thirst.

From the gorge, under great gray palisade cliffs we see the flames light the sky and it makes us wild like the men who first laid their hands on fire, who burned off their fingerprints so that we cannot find them beyond bones and needles and old spearheads stuck into the ground like pennies in a gutter.

Billy raises his six-shooter, left handed, crooked smile, unburied. His famous laugh breaks the wailing woman’s cry and she stops, and listens to his voice rattle like a baby snake.

            ‘We’re all made of wild things.

            We’re made of touch, of caress,

            And of the way your eyes flutter over me.’

She doesn’t know whether to rip him open with her desperation, or to meld hers with his somehow in the midst of the burning world.

How I want to be there, in that ocean when Noah’s ark rocked away in the darkness. The world underneath new–in that ancient tumbler of boulders—and I’d be as smooth and slick as a sugared strawberry.

Finally she says:

            ‘There’s no space here, in this air, in the remaking, for old, sharpness.

            The love here moves us. Makes us. Wild to understand.’

And I think here, in the gorge, under walls of these stone giants, I’ve found the kind of twister that slung Slue-foot Sue into oblivion. I wonder–I’ve forgotten–if she wore her wedding dress? Her veil twisted and gauzy with creek water. As she rode, wielded, conquered, crashed that mammoth catfish into the howling moon.

            I wonder if the twister made her–

            made her hot– like the desert sea of sand and rattlers.

            made her cool down in the night– like a bride uncovered.

            made her mad– like the catfish who could live out of water:

            alive like an inside out stallion. It’s inside a flurry of flesh and fur and a

    dazzling mane that set free would have colored the wind on the plains.

On the day when the giants froze into mountains, staring at each other across the Cimarron river, the moon wolves yelped and withered into coy-otes: howl-less and brown like dirt. And our legends met our ghosts with pistolas and lagrimas.

On the days of our births we breath the dust of memories

And it scours our flesh, smooths our skin, fills up our lungs.

And God says at each beginning and beginning again that it is good.

He said we are perfect.

And so we breathe now. As we breathe again. And we continue our remaking.

But the earth is cracked like a battleground.

Like footsteps. Like a mine of years and stones:

Rough and brilliant.

Sharp and smooth.

For one whole decade I was a giant:
my tunic smelled of rotten milk and frying meat;
my knuckles cracked all on their own;
and I had enormous, tired, watery eyes.

Yet the children’s faces lit up at mine;
I was good—when I ate them,
I spit them up again, nom, nom, nom.
Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.

Once upon a time I was a lover too,
cavorting among the fairies, queens,
all of us in rolled-up denims,
balling, in so many ways,  and illegal.

Now, I am shrinking—my son’s hair overtakes me,
standing up like a chariot horse’s mane—
and I am dragged behind him into battle,
my hands bleed and the wind singes my jowls.

In the Wellspring, a cop half my age
shoots the breeze with me, then leaves,
saying Have a nice day, ma’am.
What business have I, being a ma’am?

I very-almost parked in handicapped
but my hybrid wagon, blue fish that carries me

hither and yon, swam in the large spot,
and I thought better of it.

The scabrous odors of war are thick upon me,
I want a ticket out. But I’m so tiny now,

I slip through all the rails,
like jacks through my once-gigantic hands.

when he comes home
steer heavenward
like a movie about flying into the sun

airlift cattle to a terrace with orange trees
I’m the last thing he wants
nothing to see from here but villas in Tuscany

computer his raw pet
bone bad
spinning silk in his lap

sky stops giving out lilac trump cards
I retreat to the windowsill
enough small cows there to flatten a city