After Hannah Baveja

We stood on the Mars-red railway pass

Toes curling over the edge, fifteen feet above

The river bottom stewing in August—

Rusting leather-seated wheelchairs,

Slatted red-handled, silver-wired shopping carts,

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Old-fashioned, newly made, ten-speed racing bikes,

And children’s tennis shoes with tongues like dogs.

The Presumpscot boiled like tomato soup,

Frothing with all these things we swam with,

Friendly with them as the fat, female ducks,

And their puddles of sopping bread.

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We no longer bragged that we could swim,

But they knew—saw us wet and skinny,

Tan lines buckled around our hips.

We still screamed like children—

We still were children, I think, at twelve.

We hit the water with the sound

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Of flesh on flesh, hand to skin.

We fought with the placid river—

Sometimes we won and we drew

The Presumpscot into our mouths,

Above Razor scooters and squelching mud.

In September it cooled and we sat

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On the sloping banks with twenty-five cent gum

In our mouths, heads tilted toward the Vs

Of hollering Canada geese,

To which we hollered back

Call and repeat campfire songs.

We liked being heard, liked everything

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Until our big sisters came home,

Each of their ankles wrenched, skin puckered, one

Hanging off a boy like a playground tire swing.

Then we listened to the water

Hitting flesh on flesh, hand to skin,

Listened to who we would be

When we resurfaced.

Lizzy Lemieux wrote the poems in her collection “The Presumpscot Baptism of a Jewish Girl” as a 2014-2015 fellow in The Telling Room’s Young Emerging Authors program. That collection also was named a finalist for the 2015 Maine Literary Award for Poetry, marking the first time a teenager has ever been a finalist in that category.

The book focuses on themes of identity and familial history. Her work appears in the journal The Red Wheelbarrow, the Scholastic Arts & Writing Awards’ anthology Maine Teen Writing of 2015, and the May 2015 issue of Maine Magazine. She attends Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, as the winner of the Virginia B. Ball Creative Writing Scholarship Contest.


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