"Twins"
Click here to listen to Debra Nystrom read this poem.
Some girls still do it at about that age, end of grade-school, together warding off
the thought of boys, wearing identical
shirts and pants, maybe different-colored
stripes or trim, haircuts not quite the same.
Jan and I exchanged rings with our rhyming
nicknames engraved inside, no thought
of anything odd in it, or of how desperate
we each were to be complete, sealed off
from desolate moms --Jan's left by a second
husband for someone else again, marooned,
too shook up to remember milk or bread half
the time, or when the school day ended;
my mom a real twin whose twin, shipped out
to Asia with the navy, had let her fall
to a rip-tide marriage along with me, little
dead-weight, little buoy. Late afternoons
Jan and I drifted past the government housing,
the cemetery, beyond the ragged edges of town,
imagining ourselves, like the great heroines
Debra Nystrom's books of poetry are Torn Sky and A Quarter Turn. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia.
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