Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

My best friend growing up, Sarah, was the best confidant a girl could have. Funny and kind and supportive. We’d laze in the creek by my house in the valley or play in the shaded creek by her house in the hills, or climb the oaks to pick mistletoe, or talk for hours as we’d walk my yellow lab, Dusty, through the streets of Sonoma, California. Just two days ago she called me and said, “I’m in town and I’m walking down Dusty’s path and I thought I should call you because I am on Dusty’s path.” And it made me tear up. Here we are, 46 now, and still we hold each other and our shared past so dearly.

Today’s poem is a tribute to those early kinships and how it’s not only the memories that are important, but the fact that they are shared in the hearts of our beloveds.

Bonfire Brides
by Faylita Hicks

“The embers of a Thousand Years
Uncovered by the Hand
That fondled them when they were Fire
Will stir and understand—”
                         - from Emily Dickinson’s “1383”

Remember when we hurried
          ourselves into the evening’s sacral blaze:

Our coal-covered bridal gowns
          drenched in the long silver

of our mother’s years? Our hearts ceaselessly
          sucking on their stars long dead?

Our laughter pouring out of us
          like a sacrifice to age and weather?

If we had known what lay beyond the gates
          of our hooded child, would we have even left?

Would we have so happily run into the enflamed morning
          with our fists and query and hunger? Should we have stayed?

Sister, do you remember when we wanted god?
          Were all tendril? Sweet-cheeked for heaven?

Do you remember when we were sick with Bible verses and hymns?
          Our mouths overcome with hallelujah?

Our mouths slowly sewn into the crooked neck
          of every sunset? Do you remember the place

where we laid down our child-shapes
          and grew out our hair?

Yours—an unrelenting wave slipped from the bed
          of your precious scalp

down into the looped bone of your back?

Mine—a cacophony of glitter and grease leaping from the barrel 
     of my hungry scalp to arrive restlessly around the pillars of my ears?

Do you remember the place where we skipped—
          two girls chasing themselves

across the lake’s green and warm lid
          off into the untested fields

of prairie grass and unchecked verbena?
          The place, remember, where we learned

the dissonant lean of every foot worn
          into the unpaved pathways?

Somewhere outside of Dallas—
          where we skinned our knees

running after pink-fisted kisses
          from suns who, back then, hung a praise

before our names? Where I buried my first dead—
          a bird I found at the lake house?

Where we swore never to be like our mothers
          or our fathers?

Where we swore, under god’s morning light,
          to be more like the comets falling

in our cabins, night after night?
          Do you remember where, together, we came

from a yard full of Jesus?
          Where he was under every wooden plank, every split stone—

always guaranteed to follow us home?

Jesus—we thought we’d have more time.
          Jesus—what happened to time?

I blinked and we were in love—
          then out of love—
then child-shaped again—
                      then not—then the both of us alone. Together.
The both of us crying into the empty 
          of our kitchen sinks.
Jesus—how did we get here, again?

"Bonfire Brides" by Faylita Hicks. Originally published in American Poetry Review. Used by permission of the poet.