I’m Not a Child Anymore Two Prose Poems by Sarah Frances Moran

I’m Not a Child Anymore

Let’s discuss the appeal of tents made of Ninja Turtle Sheets. How when you’re 16 you long for those things but ignore them because they aren’t cool. Like how a guitar riff is cool but not that guitar riff, because it’s too old and who is that guy with the long frizzy hair and who is this weird witchy woman with a voice that buzzes?

They aren’t cool.

But I longed for sheet tent forts—for blasting Gold Dust Woman so loud the pitbull would howl. For writing reports on what drugs exactly Stevie was taking that made the whole class look at me with a level of suspicion I hadn’t yet experienced. For the complexity and dual simplicity of those minor moments. Of small hopes and larger hurts. Of admiration that morphed into desire.

Wondering if her golden hair smelled like my momma’s Pantene Pro-V. Wondering if the average sixteen year old had crushes on women in their forties. Wondering just how long I could endure squinty eyes and slow head shakes side to side.

You touch, I have no choice … I have to stay.  I had to stay. Oooooh I had to stay.

Junebugs

Midnight trips across Galveston Bay. Saltwater lips and darkness. Exhaust fumes and cackled laughter from children wild with the night. We were June bugs on a trip into nothing. Bouncing our bodies off each other in the backseat of a too small Chevy Camaro.

Sticking to whatever we saw.

Those voyages catalysts for forgetting. A constant leaving behind. They didn’t harbor the sounds of divorce. The screaming and then the drunk pleading. They only came with the ocean, The dead of night gusts of salt air. The feeling of being free inside the expanse of something more massive than us………… and of resilience.

The way our hard outer shells masked the pain we endured. The way we slammed into life, maniacally, got up and kept on going.

Like the Junebug …                   that never minds the jitters.

Sarah Frances Moran is a writer, editor, animal lover, videogamer, queer Latina. She thinks Chihuahuas should rule the world and prefers their company to people 90% of the time. Her work has most recently been published or is upcoming in Drunk Monkeys, FreezeRay Poetry, Dirty Chai, Crabfat, Rust+Moth, Maudlin House and The Bitchin’ Kitsch. She is Editor/Founder of Yellow Chair Review. You may reach her at www.sarahfrancesmoran.com