By Lisa Szymanski
We were thirteen and bored, hanging at Wheaton Plaza,
an open-air mall close to home with a dividing line
of small trees stretching from Wards to Woodies
past stores we knew as well as each other’s houses,
an alternate universe where we could practice being
other girls – not the ones doing homework, setting
the table, and minding our manners – but those fast girls
lids caked with eyeshadow, tasting our freedom and
our first cigarettes, sashaying down the Plaza runway
in hip-hugging bell bottoms and tight tops, bellies exposed
for any wandering eye. At Lerner’s where mom always
took me for school clothes, my best friend and I tried on
padded bras, pulled on our shirts to admire the effect,
then stole out of the store, escaping with our bold new breasts
and the saleswoman noticed and started after us. But oh,
we had become other girls, wild and fast, and were not caught.
Three years later, the young Lyon sisters headed from home
to the Plaza for their first taste of freedom – Easter décor
and lunch at the Orange Bowl. But some man was wild and fast
and stole them before anyone noticed; and they could not escape
his grip, his car, his house of horrors, and no one could catch him
and no one ever found those poor girls who slipped this universe
and became the first of his many other girls.
Lisa Szymanski is a retired instructional consultant in Northern Virginia, active in several poetry and memoir workshops. A few of her poems appeared in several now-defunct chapbooks. She is drawn to the rhythm and musicality of words and a poem’s ability to zero in on the complexity of the human condition with plain language precision.