“Childhood at 94 Elm St.” and “Ballet”

By Katie Lipoma

Childhood at 94 Elm St.

It never rains on summer Saturdays
in Massachusetts where the driveway doesn’t
cease to end and pitted brick grazes
golden sky.
It’s morning and the clothesline is full and
so are the blackberry bushes, and the usual
neighborhood crowd celebrates with
popsicles in pine trees, shoes only sometimes,
and secrets on the old tire swing out back—
long days forged in fern and so little
time to make a mess of
what
we
have.
Grammie tells us to stay clear of the woods
at the first hint of
dark,
and she says it will swallow us
whole.
“Enjoy the sun while you can”
and we laugh, because we don’t know
that we won’t always be eleven and sunburnt
and our hands, purple with berry juice.
Grammie’s in the kitchen while we
run barefoot after dark, footsteps heard only
by the night and the rain clouds up ahead.
“Come inside and don’t look back,” she says.
“The coyotes are out and they are hungry.”

---

Ballet

The tall, thin woman exuding elegance and experience says “we’re all here to have fun”
like it is time for recess and we’re just kids being kids about to jump into one big mud
puddle but my hair is tight and itchy and I am told that baby pink gets dirty fast
and in that room—vast and empty—
generations of dust cling to aged cedar floorboards
awoken with each little sweep and kick
and there’s bows and bows,
pliés and applause and “let’s watch the older girls now,”
with their movements so effortless, joy so transparent
until the music fades and there are critiques and tears
and the tall, thin woman says “we’re all here to have fun”
but her pointy feet do not agree
and I am born into ballet
complete with cashmere wraps and permanent goose bumps
and angry French terminology
like chassé pas de bourrée
and grand jeté
repeated over and over
grand jeté
grand jeté
grand jeté
and again
we spin across the floor one by one, two by two,
blinded by our own dizziness
and the disappointment from the tall, thin woman
making comments about our bodies
and at thirteen, my stomach was too pronounced and nothing I did was right
and the girls in class are complaining about their legs
and arms and waists and the next year we all look sickly,
skin and bones, skeletons of our former selves,
and perfect
ballerinas
and the tall, thin, cruel woman says it’s tough love
when she digs her heel
hard into my back during our splits,
driving me closer to the ground and further away from
the thing I used to love
and there’s tears concealed by long sleeves
and the lowering of heads
and I know that I want to turn around
and hit her
hard or tell her that she “better know what she’s doing next time”
and call her fat and ugly
but I’m tired and my body aches
for who I was
before ballet
and so, when the final curtain closes
so does a decade of experience,
memories that settle into a heavy dust and cling to shadows beneath the barre
like apparitions of a past life,
keeping me forever chained to what birthed and destroyed me.

---