Tara Shea Burke
Filthy and loud, she never shuts her mouth, stomps calloused feet into mud, presses earth between her toes like red meat cranked hard through a grinder, organs and viscera all mashed together, leaves it caked on her heels, under her toenails—Look! she says to no one, her parents hard pressed on tuning her out. She pushes herself into anything: knees into brown leather school bus seats beside her clean and blond best friend, tells stories with sex words she keeps in a red fuzzy diary, the bus driver up front, the girls in the way back scrunched against the window, leg hairs touching, their stories little daydreams: boys from their fifth grade class kissing them like scenes from TV. Like this, they mime, giggle and squeal, up and down old valley roads until the driver, who’s known them since kindergarten, says Quiet down now girls, be good and like a contagion they spew invisible droplets of life and laughter, knock their heads in pure joy, and their necks open up like gullets over an oceanic sky, squirming little wiggly hips until the fun seeps out, leaving a milky space. The friend hops off, bounces up a long country driveway, then no one is left but her, the mountain road the last stop, end of the county line—so the little mountain girl closes her eyes, lets her blood sync up with the vibration of the bus on the road as it winds steep climbs past hollers. Her arm hairs dance, knee indentations slowly release from the seats, and one day the good friend will stop inviting her over—a button-pusher, she shows girls what to do with hot tub jets, and they join in for a while, open-mouthed discovering their bodies and what comes, but something will change—her friends will learn embarrassment, have parents who’ll softly explain what’s made for private, and she’ll be alone again with all the world and its machines, how they hum
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Tara Shea Burke is from Paris, Virginia, and teaches at VCU and the Visual Arts Center of Richmond. Her poems were recently published in Screen Door Review, Shenandoah Literary, Khôra, and Southern Humanities Review. Lately, she’s absorbed in making shorter, surreal love poems, speculative stories, handmade quilted things, and clay houses.