and hands scented with myrrh and vetiver and bergamot and basil and lemon and patchouli. A soup?on of lust-musk. Little thunders of orange, bitter and sweet. We are grown women and we want him, need him. We are birds that can fly away and come back home; we are birds with a nest to tend. We are birds with babies to feed. His mouth to our mouth to their mouth. We are birds that can escape this but we don’t want to. We want to be in the kitchen cooking for him, pregnant with seeds of him, watering them, growing them, nurturing them, speaking to them—our gardens. We wear sackcloth and pillowcase dresses and make dough with our rosemary hands. We put on our glowing nightslips and nightslip the bread into the oven, our fingers blued with berries. We close the kitchen windows to the Santa Anas—those devil winds—and we make sun tea on the back porch, waiting patiently for it, braiding each other’s hair smoked with cedar and cinnamon. The hell-orange fires dragon-rage to the north. He lifts our dresses, his hands pinked with berries. He squeezes our thighs, our full bottoms, his hands warmed with kettle water. He drinks milk from our breasts, licks our nipples and sucks, climbs inside of us and we open wide. Our drowsy eyelashes sweep him away and back again—across the white dew of morning, the navy mist of night. We press our mouths against his, slip our tongues into his heat, brush our cheeks against his soft, dark, vanilla beard, against the tender buffalo plaid he pulls on when evening cools. We beg for this, we ache for this, we want this. He gives generously, unselfishly, not unlike a god. We moan and sing in our nest until we are sirens silenced. We smell of him until we bathe in lavender rainwater, in holy hyssop and serious moonlight—rapturously captive. He tells us, You can leave whenever you want. Do you want to stay? Do you want this? Do you want? Do you? Say yes.
Out of the Strong,
Something Sweet
Always, the three of us. One black girl, two white girls in the sun—those clicky striped vinyl lawn chairs from 1985ish that Claire’s dad still had in their garage for whatever reason. We were in the backyard, not the front. Last time we were out front, Mandy’s asshole brother stopped in his red Stang and asked us if we knew what a pussy was before skeeing off and running the stop sign at the end of our street. Hannah had sat up and pushed her sunglasses atop her head. Of course we know what a pussy is, asshole. We were fourteen. Mandy’s asshole brother was seventeen and thought he knew the world because his dad gave him that car. Because next year he’d be a senior. Like it mattered. What mattered is that he’d scared Claire and Claire had told her mom and Claire’s mom had told Claire’s dad and Claire’s dad had walked over to Mandy’s house and told Mandy’s parents what her asshole brother had said to us. Claire’s dad told Mandy’s parents he’d better never catch her asshole brother ever talking to us again. Claire’s dad could be scary. He always had a knife in his pocket, he rode a motorcycle, he looked like he’d done everything at least once. Claire’s mom told us to lay out in the backyard instead. Never the front. So we did. And none of us were friends with Mandy anyway.
I wasn’t trying to get tan the same way the white girls tried to get tan. How they’d hold their arms up to mine and say I’m almost as dark as you and I wouldn’t say anything because everyone knows white people want to be black and no white person wants to be black. It’s hard to understand because it’s both. I liked how hot my skin could get out there. How good it felt to spritz water all over my arms and legs and lie there and smell like coconuts and think about boys and the stack of romance paperbacks I had waiting for me when I got back home. And Hannah and Claire and I actually liked each other, which my mom had told me was very rare, ever since the three of us met in elementary school.
My mom actually liked both of their moms too and my mom didn’t really like any of the other moms because she said they were the kind of