by Megan J. Arlett
Marion says the juice is bloody because fruit are always girls.
This seems untrue, but... okay, whatever.
We three walk from school along the beach, shoeless and giggling.
Lorena forgot her keys. Lorena often forgets her keys,
sits outside her gated house, scratches the dog’s nose through a gap
in the fence. Braced teeth, matching skirts swinging,
we wedge ourselves between the garden wall and a palm tree,
shimmy up, over, and cast ourselves adrift
into the pool.
Blue and green tartan blooming around our waists,
white shirts clinging like vines to budding fruit.
Summer is opening like the thick tongues of calla lilies
which means this is the end of something.
We float in chlorine sky. The white dog yips at passersby
through the brick because that’s what bitches do.
We hold hands and form the center of our own universe.
Our dark hair interlaces. None of us are rubia, none of us catch
that laced word thrown from car windows.
At school, Don Carlos and Miss Carmen titter between classes,
insist they are the best of friends, only. We float, heads together— celestial.
Marion’s tennis teacher trains her serve insistently,
until her mother buys her a better fitting sports bra.
The sun touches what it can. Home from work, Lorena’s father
puts glasses of orange juice
on the patio table, fights the rising blood in his cheeks,
goes inside without a word. We drink the redness. We float,
squint back at the sky’s globe.
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