This Summer the Girls
This summer the girls are all wearing blue
fingernail polish, looking as if they’ve drowned
or suffocated, or been poisoned by carbon
monoxide. As if they’re trying on for size
death. Nail polish, too, is one-
size-fits-all.
This summer the girls have all dyed their hair
silver. Or gray. ‘Just to see how it looks — after all,
we won’t live to see old age — have you seen
the state of the planet?’ ‘Not natural?’ they laugh
at their mothers. ‘Your generation will
tell us about natural?’
This summer the girls have noticed summer never
ending. This summer the ending has not
noticed the girls. For the first time ever, the ending
has not noticed the girls. Because there is no ending.
Because there are no girls.
Or won’t be.
* * * * *
Relics of the Mountain West
One summer we hauled the deer antlers my brother found in the grass-
lands, from campsite to campsite, state to state, each morning
balancing them carefully atop stacked sleeping bags as we broke
camp, each night lowering them under the parked van till first light.
Another summer atop those same sleeping bags we carefully slid
each morning an ornate mid-19th century mirror my mother’s distant
cousin had given her as we passed through, a looking glass left behind
by their shared ancestor, daughter of a prophet anointed after a prior
prophet was martyred by a mob. Once we bore our relics safely home
we should have hung the mirror and the antlers on opposite walls,
so they could have beheld and reflected one another,
making a kind of infinity mirror, a time lapse of what heads are
valued for, killed for. Instead, the antlers went in my brother’s room,
the mirror hung in the living room for years before we noticed along its border
the stems of the carved flowers hovered above their buds. We had been
looking in the mirror upside down, imagining our ancestors peering back
levelly, when instead they would have been trapezing from the ceiling,
shoulders funneling into necks, heads hanging as though overloaded with invisible
antlers or deadweight halos, and capsized. We agreed that we liked the mirror
that way, and never righted it. It hangs upended still in my parents’ living
room, an observance somewhere between heir and error.