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
we knew nothing about, as orphans of
indecipherable lineage, looking out one way
toward the river, the other across a prairie-ocean,
for our secret origins. Stormy days, drying off
from the walk home before Jan's mom came in
after work, we'd open the old Brittanica at
random and laugh, or page through Life
Magazine as if analyzing data we'd collected
on remote shores: music twisting out of an LSD
researcher's stereo like toothpaste; a pair of
overalls issued by the Russian state with two
matching hairbows, for the tilted heads of Masha
and Dasha, Siamese twins attached at the back, each
looking out from a life that wasn't really her life.
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