Another Small Gathering
Someone had laced the pot,
my date shape-shifting
in the car’s plush seat.
I rolled with it, his tongue,
not sexy or soft, but possibly
earnest. I must have bit him
on purpose to regain my breath,
redirect him away from my throat.
Get it on, bang a gong, get it on,
his favorite song on the mixtape.
I was a liar, called my parents
hours later from a distant Finger Lake
to say I was sleeping at Suzanne’s.
Is a hydra like the zebra mussel
taking hold here, forever altering
the ecology of Keuka and me, half-dressed
in his younger sister’s top bunk,
my bony hips against his,
the popcorn ceiling scraping my back
each time I was flipped over.
I’d foreseen this happening
the second we left the gymnasium
with its stupid decorations.
Through the bay window of a child’s room,
the black water licked the dock,
the huge lake a dream
into which I threw my still boyish body.
He wasn’t aware of me,
nor I of him. How inelegant and sad
our untangling was, how we’d misremember it.
Copyright © 2019 by Lindsay Bernal. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 25, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Last summer I wrote several versions of this poem, then set it aside until September 27, 2018, when I spent the day glued to the Ford-Kavanaugh hearing. Christine Blasey Ford’s stirring testimony reconnected me with my own sexual trauma and empowered me to finish the draft I’d abandoned. The title emerged from the hearing when Ford describes the circumstances that brought them together as ‘a small gathering.’”
—Lindsay Bernal