“Straw Hats”
I long to frolic in strawberry fields forever with those I once hoped would be my best friends forever. The ones who all surely deserve gold medals for wiping away acid tears and messaging unfounded fears, for teaching me how to drive and making me feel alive. Those were the days when I knew how to make the bad girls stay. They all float by me in dreams with teasing schemes— The one I giggled with on afternoon school buses over silly things like Jonas Brothers CDs and boy crushes. The one I spent hours with under the full moon, drinking drug store pinot noir, getting cross-faded in our tiny dorm room. The one I held tightly in my suit-clad arms "just for kicks," then walked back to my stupid boyfriend and pretended like it wasn't an easy fix. Pretending used to be the name of the game, when our Southern mothers took our Northern father's last names, when "queer" was still a dirty word and lines, like backroads, still blurred, when the only lesbian I knew was a butch named Susan my mom introduced me to at an AA meeting and kissing girls was somehow worse than lousy boyfriends calling our pussies gross. Then, it was easier to hide the feelings than build up the nerve to tell them. Still, we made half-hearted jokes about sleepover kisses and wondered aloud if we would ever become each other's Misses. They're all grown now, married or engaged or dating, mostly men, mostly bald, mostly safeties. I'm stuck in New York--broke, horny, and reading Sappho wishing Brooklyn gay culture wasn't so fucking shallow. Through the looking glass, I see her there—the past. Those are the versions of myself trapped in and wrapped up in the straight girl fashion of having five best friends last me a lifetime, bridesmaids to stand beside me at my wedding, and caretakers to hold me when the inevitable happens. How easy it once was to pretend kissing them wasn't always hiding in the back of my mind. How difficult it is now to watch them grow older through stories that tell me nothing, giving the coldest shoulder. I want to remember the little women in straw hats who danced naked with abandon and raised black cats. They run barefoot across the sand dunes of time, their zest for life always and forever outshining mine. Their crooked smiles return from the recesses of my mind, bringing me closer and closer to the edge every goddamn time. Like a ship captain, I am drawn, always, to the lighthouse, searching through the vast, tall waves, for the summer house. I am looking for the woman who won't marry a man or find any reason to, frankly, give a damn whether I shave my legs, much less my head. I seek the one for whom I can buy records and bake banana bread. I call out to her, dreaming, and wake from nightmares, screaming, By morning, my eyes are rubbed red, full of unshed tears, and I'm left wondering if, by pretending, our time's been wasted all these years.
What is Paint Chip Poetry?
While browsing an art supply store recently, I came across a small game box filled with small paint chips and prompts—simple building blocks with which to create infinite poems and colorful sequences.
I’ve always adored poetry but never felt particularly adept at writing it. This year, I’d like to try and get better. With it being National Poetry Month, I thought it would be a fun writing challenge to use this game box as inspiration to write a brand new poem every day for the entire month of April.
The Rules
I must choose a prompt and four-to-eight paint chips at random. I get a single opportunity to re-draw a sample if I’m not feeling it, but that’s it. Just one. However, I can redraw if I get a repeat.
I must write a poem using the prompt and all of the paint chip words/phrases within the text of the poem. They must be bolded and italicized.
I must post the poem each day to Substack & include a photo of the paint chips in every post.
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