Greased Lightning
It’s like old times
the way we are laughing in
this dive bar, the smell of
stale fry oil soaked into
the wooden tables our
elbows stick to.
My friend is telling us about
the day the upper-class boy
popped her cherry—
only the details now are hilarious
and not heart-racing like
it was then, but the
way we are laughing, it’s
as though the decades hadn’t gone
anywhere and we were
those nubile, smooth-limbed does
burning simultaneously with
embarrassment and promise
when the world was at our
feet and we were too unsure of
how to tread—
The papers that year marveled at
balloon angioplasty and test tube
babies and the first successful
transatlantic balloon flight
and Jim Jones would change the way
we look at Kool-Aid forever—
but we were inventing our own vocabulary,
racy admissions whispered behind
hands, our heartbeats and the
ache between our legs matched the
hard rock thrums vibrating from the
muscle cars driven by boys with wild
hair and no inhibitions—
they’d drive by slowly, trying
out their best Kenickie come-ons,
we’d respond with Rizzo taunts
then turn away and lock arms, laughing
just as we are now, drunk on
the reflection we see
every time we close our eyes.
Lori Widmer is a full-time freelance writer and editor who writes for businesses and trade publications. She was nominated for the 2016 Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in various publications, including TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Philadelphia Stories.