Thirteen: A Prose Poem
Oct. 5th, 2010 10:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
masterofmidgetsOne of our writing exercises for today's class was to write a prose poem about being thirteen. I think the original prompt was to write about someone we were close to then that we aren't close to anymore, although some of the other responses went rather far afield of that. Not so surprisingly, it's kind of hard to pare down a long, emotionally complicated relationship into two hundred words. But I do like how this turned out, I think. I'm also finding that I like the distance that writing in third-person about myself gives me - this memory still has some sting to it, for various reasons, but writing about myself as someone else puts it far enough away that I can think of it on a craft level, and not just a personal level.
She remembered when they were ten and spent recess together hanging upside down by their knees and talking about books about dragons. But now she was thirteen and he was thirteen and he had sunshine-yellow hair and sky-blue eyes and a quick, secret smile she only rarely saw. At the harvest festival she was making tortillas with her grandmother, in a broomstick skirt and a woolen shawl and cornmeal dough flaking off her knuckles, and he was selling soap. On his lunch break he snuck over to her table and she left with him. They bought hamburgers and sodas from the tent outside the casa and ate sitting cross-legged in the grape arbor beside the church. After they walked together through the courtyard with the tourists. When they passed the blacksmith’s he stepped away to talk to him. He came back with a leaf smaller than her thumb, still warm from the fire and the hammer. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said. “It’s a secret, just for us.” And he gave her the leaf and one of the smiles she only rarely saw. She wore it as a necklace, cord strung through the twisted loop of the stem, and when she was worried or thinking she rubbed the leaf with her thumb, the thick-angled edge, the broad curve at the tip, the vein lines etched deep into the iron. She didn’t tell anyone.
She remembered when they were ten and spent recess together hanging upside down by their knees and talking about books about dragons. But now she was thirteen and he was thirteen and he had sunshine-yellow hair and sky-blue eyes and a quick, secret smile she only rarely saw. At the harvest festival she was making tortillas with her grandmother, in a broomstick skirt and a woolen shawl and cornmeal dough flaking off her knuckles, and he was selling soap. On his lunch break he snuck over to her table and she left with him. They bought hamburgers and sodas from the tent outside the casa and ate sitting cross-legged in the grape arbor beside the church. After they walked together through the courtyard with the tourists. When they passed the blacksmith’s he stepped away to talk to him. He came back with a leaf smaller than her thumb, still warm from the fire and the hammer. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said. “It’s a secret, just for us.” And he gave her the leaf and one of the smiles she only rarely saw. She wore it as a necklace, cord strung through the twisted loop of the stem, and when she was worried or thinking she rubbed the leaf with her thumb, the thick-angled edge, the broad curve at the tip, the vein lines etched deep into the iron. She didn’t tell anyone.