Pink Ladies' Smoke Session + River Maiden Wading Ceremony or I Never Liked the Photographer’s Work
Poems by Rita Mookerjee
Pink Ladies’ Smoke Session
Emily brought the weed. Emily also knew how to sculpt
a pipe with a pencil and some rolled tinfoil. What was it
with the dancers and gymnasts? Why did we always
have the drugs while you and the soccer girls gave each
other French braids and never stayed up late? At least
you brought a lighter. When I last saw you, you had
taken up smoking cigarettes. I found that ironic.
I shudder now thinking of what that makeshift bowl
did to our brains, what burning aluminum looks like
as it travels inside a teenage girl. We went into your
first car to smoke, a red Geo Prizm. I picked cat hair
off your shirt while you sprinkled green debris into
the foil. I don’t even think we packed a second. We
didn’t need to. The glass got foggy as we shotgunned
smoke back and forth, Emily, then you, then me. I see
now that this is the first time you kissed me. I don’t know
who you were performing for, but I am sure it was
a performance for you. We slunk inside, wafted
mango body spray, and curled up to watch 16 Candles
together. I tried not to think of the burning foil, of how
our lip balms tasted mixed together. Really, we could
have used an apple. I think you have some pink ladies
upstairs. I said at one point. Neither of you responded.
River Maiden Wading Ceremony or I Never Liked the Photographer’s Work
but he captured your freckled youth nicely. I only met him once.
He was so ruddy, like a skinned knee or a newborn with a downy fontanelle.
And really, I want to ask him who began this unspoken tradition of taking
high school girls in their prom gowns to the banks of the Susquehanna, lending
a dry hand while they shimmied their feet into slimy shallows kissed
by pond skaters and baby crayfish? I pity the cleaner who dealt with the after-
math; imagine pulling mayfly larva from moldy tulle. Was this all his idea, or
was this a tradition long kept from pagan days of dipping young girls
in water, bathing them to be pure or perhaps washing away the tang
of a first period if there is a difference? Did they put nice girls
in nice dresses into the river so they would learn to feel natural and stay there
like capable nymphs tasked with holding back floods? Would they
grow accustomed to eyes on their nipples in wet fabric or nothing at all?
Would this time in the river prepare beautiful girls for the coming years
spent under the eyes of the village? Because no one fell under that gaze more
than you: golden-hearted, blue-eyed pride of the school with a kind word
for everyone, even lecherous teachers who you privately reviled with me
because it was natural for you to play the radiant diplomat, your charm
unshared by those who tried too hard in their river photos, a real burden
for the photographer, I’m sure. But I was relieved when you were not coaxed
into that river maiden wading ceremony, when you didn’t submit to the mire
in your embroidered black silk. The photographer seated you on a flat
rock—a more dignified pose than the sprawls of girls whose bugle-beaded
hems lay soaked in algae. In the picture, you wear a purple top and cutoffs.
Your spine is swiveled in a posture I’d often seen you use to crack your back
after winning a match. Really, there is nothing exceptional about this image,
but I keep it in a drawer because the photographer managed to show you
as I saw you: strong, contemplative, poised to rule this place without me by your side.
Rita Mookerjee is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Iowa State University. Her poetry is featured in Juked, Aaduna, New Orleans Review, Sinister Wisdom, and the Baltimore Review. She is the author of the chapbook Becoming the Bronze Idol (Bone & Ink Press, 2019). Rita is both the Sex and Poetry Editor at Honey Literary as well as the Assistant Poetry Editor of Split Lip Magazine, and a poetry staff reader for [PANK].