P oetry R epair S hop 1999.09: 105
- CONTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL POETRY
- by new, emerging, and established poets

JULIE KING
Teenage

My son's in his rectum
phase; he and his friends fit
the word into every conversation,

I don't remember going
through this: telling the same
jokes again and again, not caring
about their audience's response,
only the timbre of their own
deepening voices.

I never arm-wrestled
my friends, testing the biceps,
triceps, each muscle
expected to perform
for its owner. Or to betray.

I do remember my friends
and I clinging to notebooks
of favorite poems, handwritten
in hot pink or screaming
green, sipping stolen champagne
from my mother's best
glasses as we recited
in our best British accents,
wanting the possess the secrets
of Alfred and Percy and Elizabeth.

My sons and his chums convene
in the backseat of my car,
chanting RECTUM, RECTUM, RECTUM
and I count the swishes
of the windshield wipers,
each arc an iamb, each block
a stanza, each mile a sonnet.

Poem copyright 1999; all rights reserved. (If you wish to copy this poem, please contact its AUTHOR).