At Seventeen

The year the local woman was murdered and her body

fed to dogs, we slipped vanilla gloss over our lips

and catwalked through green apple body spray.

When the news grew thickest, our mother spoke to us

about the nightmares stalking the detectives’ daylight—

because of the way the woman’s bones were pried

apart, because of the houndstooth patterns against

their burnt enamel. Our school spoke of nothing else,

though no one spoke of it. Clumsy sugar-seekers,

we kissed our cotton pillows, lost in the swiftfoot autumn,

doing our best to ignore how the town’s memory

hunted us. Our mother taught us to phone her

when strangers hovered near us, to speak loudly

so everyone knew she guarded us, closed-off

as two lanterns, or seashells, or anything other

than two teenage girls. I hold my daughter now,

and the same dream pursues me—of my mother

standing, alive again above a charging river,

while my sister and I, six and four, swing

from her biceps, laughing. We know nothing

of the stones cutting the waves clean through, or how

truly we’d break open onto them if our mother shifted

her weight. We know only that she is young, gigantic

as the summer we’ve lost, and she does not tremble.