Young Writers Society

I.

In the grain silo on Chastity
the dry cracked heads of wheat
fall in drifts deep enough
to lose yourself for an hour
but never for good.
It was dry earth and old sun
your father’s hand on your shoulder
the last breath of summer.

The girls on Chastity
whispered about who they had taken,
her thighs chafing like sandpaper,
the soft curve of her face breakable
beneath their lips, or her hair
thin and cut short above her ears.
Her breasts were safety and there
was no thing like risk on Chastity.

II.

In the loft of fresh baled hay
still wet and fragrant from harvest
where boys thrust each other into blankets
of aged sun and living earth
they watch with their cheeks
pressed to the crossbeams
their hands between their legs.

Behind the water tower and
in the backs of bunkhouses and
under storeroom shelves
stocked with jars of sweet peaches
and beans. They watch in shadows
and from cracks in the walls but always
they are alone.

III.

On Perpetuity there were ones who did it,
who sought it and wanted it and took it
from boys in their beds
hunting them like packs of animals
or humans who can’t remember
and the girls held their prey and took
what they needed to find their way out.

On Perpetuity there were ones who did it,
who went out to the river that cut
the back of the Compound and fire
a revolver in their bellies and bleed
their shame on the banks, dye the rocks
the color of their freedom because it’s easier
to leave if there’s something left to lose.

IV.

The old world was a fairytale
that only the ones who were there remembered
and even then, it was so long ago
when they would love you sweetly and
take you to their bedrooms with the sheets
strewn half off the bed and clothes piled
in the corners and it was okay
and it didn’t matter because it was theirs and
you were theirs and you knew that once
upon a time you didn’t have to share the things
that were yours because there was not enough
to go around for having for yourself.

V.

In the places left half between the old and the new
outside the Compounds and the society being so carefully
refined around them, it was different.
There were no barn lofts or bunkhouses or
shadowed spaces between hay balers.
The stories they told were left etched into highways
Rotting in burnt-out rest stops and even if
someone happened upon one there was
no saying they had the words left to
understand what it meant.

In the middle places there was something
to be had in an ancient, rotting van sunk
into the highway. There would never be
a girl on a Compound squatted in a ditch with
a strip of leather thick on her tongue and
the knowledge there was nothing warm or squirming
that could come screaming from something like her
not with the outline of her bones so clear against her skin
not with the curve of her abdomen so slight, so unforgiving
not with the dullness that had been left in her eyes.