Two Serious Ladies

Two Serious Ladies is named for the 1943 short novel by Jane Bowles.

“I have my happiness, which I guard like a wolf, and I have authority now and a certain amount of daring, which, if you remember correctly, I never had before.”

― Jane Bowles Two Serious Ladies

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Riding in Cars with Boys

by Carrie Murphy

Riding in Cars with Boys

Maybe Jeff will kiss you or maybe he’ll take you on a date to a Chinese restaurant & talk about vegan food but right now alone in a car with a boy in a boy’s own car at night & sitting there with a person with a penis driving a person who is not your dad a person with a penis who could accidentally or even purposefully brush your skin with his finger or even kiss you & so amazingly whizzing around your ears so you just let him talk.

Riding in Cars with Boys

You like a boy in a ska band so you & T make a screenname trombonerchick11 & IM him he doesn’t have a girlfriend he drives a Buick with a furry Shriner’s fez hanging he looks like he wants to die so love him deeply. He kisses you all light blue plush in his car & you walk inside the house & lay down on the kitchen floor next to the cabinet with the cleaning supplies & unrubberband your whole body breathes, sparkling your dad asks Reservoir? Isn’t that where kids go to neck? & you spin the bracelets on your wrist again cheeks pinking burst. Riding in Cars with Boys

You listen to the Weakerthans every night before bed & you wear a belt made out of a seatbelt to school & boys you don’t even know press it to hear that click & you want to wear glitter on your breastbone, to hang from the huge icicles outside the bathroom window, for everything then everything to crack & surge like the singing in your temples, to stare at the track lighting in the auditorium until you blink & the bulbs make every boy’s hands blot & beam, which is what will eventually happen later, the rushing in your ears, thin neon lines. Riding in Cars with Boys

His huge hand on my thigh in his mother’s Volvo & then he backed into a telephone pole. I can’t drive anyway. Crying thick & gasping & choking on the heated seats when he breaks up with me & of course I don’t let him hug me like he wants to. I’m halved while blue-veins snaking up my white wrists I’m in the margins with my black pen, writing the drizzle down the car windows while Miles Davis plays & white it out white it out white it out.

Carrie Murphy

Carrie Murphy is the author of the poetry collection PRETTY TILT (Keyhole Press, 2012) and the chapbook, MEET THE LAVENDERS (Birds of Lace, 2011). Her second full-length book, FAT DAISIES, is forthcoming in 2014 from Big Lucks Books. She received an MFA from New Mexico State University. Originally from Baltimore, MD, Carrie works as a teacher, freelance writer, and birth doula in Albuquerque, NM.