The summer we phantasmagoriaed ourselves
into oblivion was not the same summer
we couldn’t stop the pop of fat green frogs.
One hundred winters later, the snow
keeps falling, and I penny-candy my disappointments.
To heal the broken hearted, I sticky-glue doilies
to doilies and pony-mail them to Oklahoma.
I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer, a friend says,
But Mike’s dead. Liver failure. I look dead Mike up
on Facebook, and he’s an old bloated version
of the kid who’d felt up Debbie D when we were thirteen
and dizzying ourselves with carnival-cake smokes.
It’s just the stuff of life, I wanna tell Debbie D, but
what do I know about holding the memory of a now-dead man’s
hand on my pre-pubescent breast? Maybe nothing.
In the other room, my daughters sing.
All I know: that groundhog was a fucking liar.
Nicole Callihan’s poems, stories and essays have appeared in Forklift, Ohio, Cream City Review, The L Magazine, North American Review and Painted Bride Quarterly. Her first book of poems, SuperLoop, was published in early 2014. Find her on the web at www.nicolecallihan.com