Poetry by Andréa Ferrell Gannon
to repaint the swimming pool and sky for you,
Hockney blue and shadowless behind my dad’s apartment.
Remember phoning nightly? Meet me, code for walk half the road for me.
Those horrid June bugs, big as beach balls,
pinwheeling between lamplight and starlight.
We clung to each other but delighted in being
barefoot and together, for sleepovers and tequila
and yellow cloudless afternoon stretches—
you, frolicking and my trying, too.
The pool walls abraded my stomach’s tender skin
and knees when I hauled myself out to hunch
reverse butterfly in a beach map towel, Mom’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar
open on my thighs, yellowed pages pocked with water drops and chlorine.
I thought to dry them with the red end of my cigarette.
I thought, if I were to rise and walk you would see me crumble
while, your chin atop your forearms along the round concrete lip, you
chided my maturity, my sighs, cavernous as prehistory. I studied
how my goggles and your soaked blondness made a garland
upon your brow. The landlord I didn’t let you see,
his shady silhouette, red eyes at the sliders. I spoke to you
only of the wrinkled, raucous MILF who
stole my HS ring from the metal table
where I placed it for safekeeping
its stone as blue and plastic as pool water and sky.
Andréa Ferrell Gannon, MFA, is a native Californian and the daughter of an English immigrant and a Lakota. She taught French and Spanish for many years, then English to adolescent refugees and immigrants. Find her now or soon in The Washington Post, The Coachella Review, GRXL, Kelp Journal, Cricket, and Poet Lore.