Bomb Drill
BY JENNIFER PONS.
We crouch beneath
small desks shoved
against walls, away from
the possibility
of shattered windows,
our bodies curled into balls,
spines curved
like little rainbows,
hands clasped behind our necks.
The dark classrooms
and hall alarms
don’t frighten us. Teachers
carrying Walkie-talkies
rush from room to room,
their steps clicking the hours by.
Some kids ask to use the toilet.
Some kids ask
for their mother.
Some kid says
Shut up, it’s just a drill!
The science and math teachers
tell us to squeeze in
closer. Stop talking.
The music teacher
and football coach flirt.
In library voices, we discuss
who we’d kiss first
if the bomb were on its way.
We whisper past our elbows
about slow dancing
at the sock hop
and Judy Blume books
hidden in our bedroom.
It’s a few years
before Red Dawn.
Before our teen bodies ache.
Before love stories
have messy plots.
Before I run away
for the first time.
Before drinking beer
with a guy on an Amtrak
speeding across the Mississippi
into Missouri farm country.
Before my sister enlists
and escapes the midwest.
She’ll come home
with scabs and empty eyes.
It’s decades before
my children huddle
in a dark classroom,
doors and walls barricaded
with chairs and tables
turned on their sides,
water bottles in hand, ready
to throw at a shooter
or a faceless figure.
And sometimes
it goes like this:
a firetruck shows up.
The principal knocks,
releasing the hush.
And sometimes cries
rattle the windows.
At the Start of It
BY JENNIFER PONS.
After curfew, the four of us
clustered in a dugout, sitting
in dirt and dark, discussing
the Virgin birth, brides,
and garter belts. At the time,
we weren’t virgins or brides,
but talked for hours
about sex like we might
never have it again,
gossiping about boys
sneaking through dorm halls
during illegal hours,
their sweat and beer
perfuming our skin.
We were fitted and entwined,
each other’s dream catchers,
the grass baseball diamond
tucked behind the older dorms
our version of a sorority house.
Our collective secrets,
rights of passage.
And the scent of tobacco
from the surrounding fields
suspended in humidity signaled
the coming of a fresh start.
For my part, I adored
that sweet honeyed scent
of fermenting leaves seeping
into our cutoffs and sweatshirts,
curing our winsome days.
How sweet to gossip
under cover. All of us
Roman candles in a dry field.
Jennifer Pons was born in Chicago and lives in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches writing at Clackamas Community College. Nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and twice for the Best Spiritual Literature Award, her poems appear in Ninth Letter, Portland Review, West Trade Review, Red Rocks Literary Review, Spiritus, CutBank and others. A finalist for the Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry and the Pamet River Prize, and a semifinalist for the Black River Chapbook Competition, she holds MFAs from the University of Arizona and Seattle Pacific University. You can find her at jennifercpons.com, and on Instagram @jcpcoeur.