in boston we were
the only two lesbians in a restaurant full of fish and pork and
overweight men & women with minimal chest-covering.
table-tent candles coiled to the shape of a question: and what will you do
after graduating? do you know the color of all seven seas?
don’t answer that.
that year I drove to Boston – my first hours alone with an oil-
chugging beast, the keys dangling beneath the wheel. I changed lanes
drove under a grocery store, and knew that the city was near.
cityscape I know by heart by lung by purple afternoon –
river with the back of a hand and a swing-set just beneath
the surface, bridges and bridges and stories and places and names.
my mother, while driving on Mass Ave: I lost my virginity there
(as if it were something that could be found on the sidewalk)
in my freshman year with my Peruvian boyfriend, an MIT engineer.
I never did get to know my Wellesley classmates well,
spent all my weekends at his place. we would have sex
in his twin extra-long bed with the blue never-quite-clean sheets
and then sleep, my body pressed against the wall. (wasn’t
it cramped?) well, no –we were both smaller in those days.
I look at pictures of him now on Facebook and he is bald
and carries a pouch around his middle. we parted when he took a job
in the silicon valley and I started grad school. you can only
follow a man so far.
—Devi Lockwood, Cambridge, MA
