This is a picture of my cousins, Deanna and Cindy. It was taken in the mid-1970s. I wish it wasn’t so blurry but that is the case with so many wonderful images from this era. I love the yellow, orange, and white striped camper in the background. It reminds me of Barbie’s Country Camper, a gift I received for my 8th birthday.
Cindy looks so awesome in her yellow bikini. In the early 1970s, she went with us to Huntington Beach where she surfed way out on the ocean. I was so afraid she was going to drown. I sat on the shoreline staring at her as she grew smaller and smaller and folded into the waves. Soon, she was just an inch tall.
Once I Prayed In The Water
A poem by Sara Henning, winner of the George Bogin Memorial Award, 2019.
Blessed be the good-time girl thighs-deep in a striped inner tube
cattail fronds & cigarette butts lush against her toes blessed be
the empress of chic I was sixteen shellacked in Coppertone tangled
in a pick-up game of football her hands muscular birds
gripping deep through blitz & tackle all the jacked-up Fords
like piss drunk cicadas pulsing hymns through rolled-down windows
Stevie Ray and the Boss shredding through steam as I spread
my hips my legs & lunged I was the girl kissing boys in sit-top
kayaks another flea-chawed dog sun-blissed & brined as if
someone told her to breach is to breathe pretty baby it’s time to blow
this mortal coil every minute of her life so I rode the twist & flush
of summer until even the stars couldn’t look at me before I
was a woman sand-hardened late thirties I slipped like a fish
into spume I quaked all night in the weeds I fed on every shine
that would touch me so Lord, will you make a temple of the water
will you brandish your body in lake-skin for me I’ve had
enough of this lemon-swoon sfumato this musk-blaze of summer
genuflecting like a fool I’ve already buried the shame-slick
pretty young thing I was I smoked that queen when I kissed my mother
blown open by cancer watched strange men hoist her body
into an oven set to the temperature all things beautiful & terrible
begin to burn
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