ISSUE 4

Shauna Shiff

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The Confidant

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It was strawberry-lime wine you gave me,

Claiming that it was light and mostly sugar

so it canceled out the fact that I was underage.

 

You drove with your beer bottle squeezed between

denim thighs and told me that you had lived here once,

this one-room cabin in the woods we were rattling toward,

in between men, when you didn’t have two nickels

to put to your name.

 

The steel that normally stiffened your words

to thicken my skin had melted into a hitched waver.

The house didn’t have electricity, your kids had to play

on a plywood floor, toes and knees full of splinters,

and every night hunger and cold.

 

It was spring, the boughs dripping verdant,

and soon I was spinning with a lushness that felt like a foretelling:

this is how the world could be and would be from now on.

 

Wow, I said, I feel like I’m on Oprah, and you looked at me

for one long moment before you finally laughed.

As always, I found your hard face utterly becoming.

 

 

Peonies

 

She said family was an unnecessary word,

that my father could be Tom, Dick, or Harry –

but not her brother. We stood in her front yard,

both overdressed, too fancy for just standing

around. Sure, I said, and unknotted my fingers,

stilled my twisting heel that was digging divots

into the ground. Back then I was always trying

to adopt her queen-like bearing as my own,

but her words made my practiced emulation

feel futile and suddenly so very foolish. Sure,

I said again, as if acknowledging my wasted

effort, and turned from her towards her fence

of peonies, one wall of moon-sized blossoms,

displaced tubers from Indonesia that had

sprung up as orphans in the cold Maine soil.

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