So High School
after Jaime Gil de Biedma
This folded-up paper rose,
brushed past my bare skin, burns:
a child’s forehead with a fever,
a thin sheet of ice to the touch.
Some of us see these rows
of bunting, and banners, and crushed
velvet on folding chairs,
and wish it were ash in an urn.
But some of us wish we could live
as if nothing were ever over,
that glow in the rafters forever,
low stage lights like foam on a river,
every last couple together,
with never an exit door rush,
no curfew, no reason to search
the bathrooms for time-lost lovers
so nobody gets locked in,
with nobody’s first best friend
bereft, with nothing to give her,
if that isn’t asking too much.
Stephanie Burt
Peter (Memo that never lands)
Look, look, there is a sadness
that has been in you from the start.
You lay in bed doing scenes
in your head of being held by a loving
mother who looked like Christine
(also your name) from Night Court,
the public defender who spent her time
eschewing Dan’s advances,
the prosecuting attorney.
Christine held you as you tried to sleep,
voices screaming downstairs,
thunderous. Your imagination was a large country.
Some nights you summoned her so hard
that you flushed, sweated through
the sheets, the internal heat burning
through your Strawberry Shortcake
gown. Turn that frown upside
down, your father said in the morning,
stomping around on floors he owned.
You thought by now you’d be farther
away from this, didn’t you, forty
years later, up at 4 a.m., twisting,
reaching
back toward you—
returning for you,
I promised to come
and get you, carry you,
your thick glasses
and overbite,
over oceans to a happy
galaxy
but the problem
is gravity.
(Shhhh… don’t tell her.
She will give up if she
learns she will never fly.)
Kristie Frederick Daugherty
Note: These poems are part of Hits Different, a forthcoming collaborative chapbook.
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Stephanie Burt is the Donald and Katherine Loker Professor of English at Harvard. Her latest books are Taylor’s Version: The Musical and Poetic Genius of Taylor Swift (Basic) and Super Gay Poems (Harvard UP).
Kristie Frederick Daugherty is the editor of Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift from Random House. She is a professor and founder of The 113 Poets Foundation.