That day in the neighbor’s front yard it was so hot
everyone stripped shirtless, in cutoffs, shorts, knees
banged grassgreen, fingernails ringed in dirt.
We were playing muckleball one kid gripping
the ball as if life depended on it everyone else muckling
him down to the ground. We were all piled up, sprawled,
belly to belly, legs and arms octopussing every direction
when Pete’s older brother drove up to the house.
I didn’t understand the science of sex then,
that it’s like fire, that it’s not what you expect,
that red flames burn the coolest, or that orange and yellow
flames burn like suns, full of debris, compromised, like us someday.
So when Jeff - that was his name - got out of the car
and looked over at me, it was a white flame, the hottest of all
that sparked a blaze in my belly, quickening
my bare toplessness into pure tinder box.
Until then I’d just been one of the boys
shadowboxing the neighborhood like everyone else
turning over roadkill, staring into the sizzle
blowing up frogs with firecrackers.
But under his gaze, the air in the yard ribcaged
and squeezed around the pink prickling skin
of my suddenly naked 10-year-old chest.
The incandescent gladiolas nodded and waved
and the summer’s heat crackled
and stung me like a swarm of bees.
Karen Elizabeth Sharpe is from Rutland, Massachusetts, where she lives with her partner and two pandemic rescue dogs. Karen is the author of Prayer Can Be Anything, (Finishing Line Press) and This Late Afternoon (Dunn & Co.). A member of the National Baseball Poetry Festival executive committee and poetry editor of The Worcester Review, her poems have appeared widely, including in SWWIM, Whale Road Review, The MacGuffin, The Comstock Review, Split Rock Review, and On the Seawall among others.
