Girls by Aza Pace
Associate poetry editor Heath Joseph Wooten on today’s bonus poem: “Girls” is exactly the kind of poem I love reading—a quiet reflection, an ode pieced together with a tender, heartbreaking eye for detail. Like the Dickinson poem after which this was written, Aza Pace has found the music in the temporal distance “between dreams of child and woman,” and like music, “Girls” will linger with you long after reading.
Girls
—after Dickinson’s “Split the Lark”
We glowed with a secret tucked in one cheek, our bodies split
between dreams of child and woman. These were the
luscious days. We braided twigs in each other’s hair on a lark,
whispered about first blood and new bras with hook and
eyes. Now let’s play MASH, see what boy you’ll
marry. (Neither of us marries.) You were the real find,
my ride or die, my midnight bookworm, the
Of course god can forgive you, my sweet music.
I loved you with a shy gravity, like an iris bulb
stretching green fingers in the dark. After
all that, how did we ever lose touch? Still, an electric bulb
behind my ribs flicks on at the thought of you busy in
distant cars, apartments, churches. Your glory burns silver
in the eye. Burnished and true: that’s always how we rolled.
Aza Pace’s poems appear in The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, New Ohio Review, Mudlark, and elsewhere. She is the winner of a university Academy of American Poets Prize and an Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston and is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of North Texas.
