Seven-Year-Old Girls’ Sleep-over Party, 1970                                             

by Karen Friedland

                                                                                                                       

We went tribal, that night.

It was epic—

Near-naked, we painted flowers around our belly buttons

with a mother’s lipstick

and formed warring camps—

fighting pitched hula-dance battles

until a mother came in,

pleading for mercy,

claiming 2 a.m.

And where, oh where, are those pleasure-drunk,

dancing seven-year-old wild girls now?

Old, with sagging bellies, I imagine—

frayed,

having been slit open repeatedly

to remove wombs, tumors, babies.

Yet, might we be yearning to break free,

paint flowers around our aging, wrinkled belly buttons

with lipstick, and fight pitched hula battles once more?

We might be.

 

* * * * *

A nonprofit grant writer by day, Karen’s poems have been published in Nixes Mate Review, Writing in a Women’s Voice, the Lily Poetry Review, Vox Populi and others. Her book of poems, Places That Are Gone, was published in 2019 by Nixes Mate Books, and she has a chapbook forthcoming in late 2020 from Cervena Barva Press. She lives in Boston with her husband, two cats and two dogs.