By Connor Watkins-Xu
1993
Young, younger, your mother, states away. No one
calls you crater-faced. You get to be Stephanie for a while.
Summer goes until December, and boys love to hear you say
Y’all are crazy down here, your Alabama accent in the ear
for a moment, like sun-showers on beach-burned skin.
You don’t have to worry about me, but I know you’re
already set on graduating to that motherly dream.
A Benetton sweater, Reeboks double-strapped beneath
bright leg warmers; you make them seem like angelwear.
I can see the neon, the palm trees between sheets of blue,
and they’re not holding up the moon or the casinos.
You’re not holding the hands of your sisters
when your mother disappears into a flick of ash,
her magic trick. A snap, another man, then dirt on the carpet,
the shoes stacked tall. I hope you don’t fear being like her
yet. You can’t drink, so maybe you take me to the strip
to sing. We walk and hear “I Get Around” somewhere
along South Beach, slinking out from a glossy Caprice
with underglow. You wanna sing TLC, Madonna, or Whitney,
or maybe we’re Kris Kross before our roles get switched.
Then we’re at the soccer field where the smell of barbecue
fills the neighborhood, and you bite into sugary muffins
with corn kernels peeking through. Something sweeter
than blueberries, you say. You don’t have to think of
who will be lost and left. Your body doesn’t ache,
and who but me knows your name? You’re no mother,
no sister, no one’s aunt. I want to remember you alone,
knowing beneath all beauty there’s something buried.
Connor Watkins-Xu holds a BA in Professional Writing from Baylor University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland, where he taught creative and academic writing. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Gargoyle, Salvation South, Hawai’i Pacific Review, and elsewhere. His manuscript was named a semifinalist for the Berkshire Prize and The Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry. Originally from Tuscaloosa, AL, he now lives in Seattle.