Wendy Kagan

​Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board
  
Hungry for black magic, for divination in the suburban dark, we’d pick the slightest among us & lay her down supple as a new spring shoot. She’d shut her dandelion eyes & slack her limbs like the dead as we kneeled round, loose-slid our fingers under her butterfly-wing shoulders, hips, knees, feet. Queen bee among us held the scalp’s weighted cradle. Soon our whisper-chants began as we summoned the occult in nighties & PJs on a slumber-party floor. Once we did it in a cemetery, laid her fearless head by a stone. Flexed our spells until we swore she became weightless, swore we saw light under her hover-held body. We had lift-off. Better than NASA & its moonwalker men, we gave gravity the slip. Practice-kissed Death on the lips, turned Earth on her axis, dawned worlds. We were girls. Nothing we charmed wouldn’t do our bidding.
 
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Ouija
 
In frilly bedrooms of dusty rose, we set fairy tables for the undead. They arrived on phosphorescent wings as we laid out our divining tools. Never mind it was a parlor game, trademarked by Hasbro. We trafficked in esoterica; our small hands skittered across the surface with witchy ease. Spirits moved them—can you feel it? Plied with questions, they plucked out answers letter by letter. Plath & Hughes made their own talking board with an overturned brandy glass as a planchette. Channeled their hot subconscious. Dabbled in necromancy. What we really wanted: to gash the veneer of the ordinary with polished fingernails. Chip away chemical lawns, driveway newspapers, the music-box tinkle of ice cream trucks. Yank a portal to the unborn. Make ourselves mouthpieces. Become oracles.
 
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Blood Sisters
 
We coveted cuts, self-inflicted pinpricks. A picked scab was kismet, a chance to press our crimson together. By mingling plasma, we sealed our sisterhood. Mere friendship wasn’t enough—we needed that bloodbond written in the skin. Just before AIDS made everyone afraid, we solemnly merged cells: For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Our schoolyard romps revolved around a set of twins, blonde & Gothic, in matching hair bobbles. A mythic closeness we could only imagine. Fate gave us brothers with dirt bikes & cowlicks & smoldering silences. We craved doubleness. Bubble-lettered our longing on scented stationary at sleepaway camp, along the ruffled edges of Maine lakes where the loon would call her lonely call. Bloodoath unbroken. Wounds reaching for each other, soft as pines across the wilderness.
 
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Self-Defense for Celestial Bodies
 
On the radio they speak of dark matter as I comb the Web, untangle its dark filaments to find pepper spray for my daughters—protector saint of habanero, lachrymose evil-eye friend to clip on a belt or fist-grip, running. They speak of bits that don’t interact with light, early-universe particles, scaffolding of galaxies. Some come pocked with rhinestones, others lethal pink & lipstick-shaped. Daphne could’ve hazed Apollo’s face instead of morphing into a laurel tree, frozen in bark as he groped her. I put my faith into this cloak of cayenne, put pepper spray in my cart for my daughters. We watch how-to videos & practice wielding the invisible: point nozzle out, flick safety switch & thumb-click trigger. Talisman of temporary blindness, swifter than prayer. Dark matter bends light across the cosmos—we can’t see its dark hand, though stars at spiraled edges spin away from us.
 
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Young Love
 
The windshield is a crisscrossed geometry of frost as we wait for the school bus, 6:30, 13 degrees in the just-started car & my daughter has been asking questions all week, how old was I for my first boyfriend, first kiss, is she running late at 14, & I tell her there is time, love’s not a 100-meter dash & young love is awkward anyway, a practice run for when two people, easy in their skin, can be easy around another’s skin—& we are idling in our own breath-clouds when a song comes on the radio, rock anthem portal to youth, & like a garland of birds that lifts from the powerline all at once & sashays into flight, I’m in a dorm bed where a boy & I lie next to stereo speakers, upswell of violin & electric guitar star-shooting through us, body to body barely touched, bridged by the bridge of a song & fresh as a lake cracking open in spring. In spring.
 
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Self-Love
 
After the doctor slit my belly open, a hooked fish, a purse unzipped & spilled onto the OR table—ripped cinema tickets, pens drained of ink, unlucky pennies—after he took the sick part out & stitched a jagged seam up my middle, every day I asked a nurse to fill the Pepto-pink bedside basin with hot water & baby soap that crested like egg foam, new life, then I dipped the rough terry in & wrung it out steam-wreathing to rub one moon-pale segment at a time, forearm, sternum, calf, hip, the way a cat runs the rasp of her tongue, until I could no longer avoid the very centre of the centre of myself—red rutted road, flaming abyss, solar plexus radioactive—& I dabbed that barbed-wire zone, rooting for the torn edges to find each other again, come together skin to skin like dancers or lovers, reaching for wholeness like any broken thing.
 
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Campsite, Block Island
 
We plunged through brush & bramble to get there, thorn of wild sea-rose tracing thin red scabs on our shins. We scaled low stone wall, found moss-cupped clearance between scrub tree & bush where we raised a tent for the night. Within ripstop nylon walls, we tumbled orbits round muscle & skin, sought out bluffs & hollows of each other. July’s damp breath between us as we lay spine to spine with earth, its sinuous roots. Above: leaf & star. I’ve made a green altar there, Shinto shrine where I go sometimes to love’s early days, ours, among crickets & katydids, musk of bayberry & blown salt. How long would it last, this rigged-up joy? We zipped a membrane between ourselves & coming storm, slam of waves in the distance. Next morning, tent’s a lantern, blazing light. Fragile scrim still standing. Us sun-dazzled inside it.
 
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This poem first appeared in First Literary Review-East.

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Wendy Kagan writes in a converted barn in the Catskill Mountain foothills, preferably on a loveseat by her wood stove with a cup of creamy British tea. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Eunoia Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Blood Moon Aria was long-listed for the Yellow Arrow Publishing 2024 chapbook competition and is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks. More at wendykagan.com.