Tailgating

You jump out of the car in the middle of the college town where you went to poetry readings with sushi and wine, where you served wings and got fired for your inability to smile, where you became a feminist and an atheist and made your mother and your boyfriend cry. Your family follows you down sunlit alleys and you feel the heat fight it out with the shadows at ten AM and you know it’s going to obliterate your makeup and your hairspray and your will to live by noon, so you steer everyone towards the bar with the tiger painted in a beer mug and order two ciders and a shot and then you are on a patio talking with your mother about your sex life, explaining how you think about it all the time but almost never with your husband even though he is great in bed like a generous dolphin and your mother is staring at you with an expression that means she’s trying to relate but you have passed her threshold for sexual honesty and you find yourself wondering whether your mother has regular orgasms, because of how many of your twenty-something friends have confessed to you that they have never orgasmed and don’t even really try to, which always makes you freak out and demand that they make their boyfriends go down on them TONIGHT! You shut your fucking mouth for once, and the sun just blasts you as you step out of the bar. It’s eleven thirty and you and your mother have to pick up the fried chicken. You walk past where you played soccer with your sister’s ex-husband before she even met him because you were both lonely,  past where you got married to the boyfriend who cried about your new feminism and gave you your first orgasm and has since come around to Kristeva and Cixous when you say their ideas like they are your own, past where the two of you first met, which is about thirty yards from where you got married, past the square brown dorm rooms where you had sex over the heads of your friends while they were trying to watch a movie about Lewis and Clark. Your legs erupt with sweat and red itchy skin and you’re walking like you have diaper rash, but you know everybody still thinks you’re sexy. Your husband waddles up with the cooler. Your bearded cousin appears with his toddlers and his thin, frazzled wife who you struggle to talk to while everyone is eating and sweating and waiting for the game to start, the crush of bodies at the gate, the chanting and the drumline marching past that makes you understand why they used to carry drums into battle and that you are way too drunk and that the sun is going to turn it into a hangover while you sit for hours wedged between your cousin and your husband who are also both pretty tanked, there will be high-fives and you will sweat so much that you become comfortable with the sweat and begin to pray to God to make you sweat even more and to pray to your dead grandfather that your team will make this fourth and one. You will look up to the top of a stadium and remember the first time, as a little girl, when you thought about leaping off the lip of the concrete bowl and then shivered as a breeze squeezed between bodies, stroked the base of your neck. 

DORSEY CRAFT is the author of Plunder (Bauhan Publishing 2020), winner of the May Sarton Prize. Her writing has received support from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the Anderson Center at Tower View. Dorsey's poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Poetry Northwest, Triquarterly, and elsewhere. She currently serves as assistant poetry editor for Agni and teaches creative writing at University of North Florida.