Second Wave
It was the Osmonds on 45s, the record covers all toothy matching faces.
It was spelling bees, Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, my tight uneven braids.
We studied “Morning has Broken” as a poem. We wrote our own.
It was the first time that tide broke over me.
Then the teacher’s arms arced across the blackboard,
as a nucleus bulged and orbits of electrons multiplied,
and the world clicked into focus like the optometrist’s phoropter.
I cut my hair to a frizzy Farrah flip with a center part.
I wore flowered button-downs, green flared corduroys.
It was Eleven Blue Men and The Once and Future King,
and echoes of Kennedy’s Camelot from eleven years before.
It was poems and journals in my bedroom. I argued with Mom.
Why should I choose pathology just to accommodate children?
Why couldn’t my husband take care of them too?
It was Peter Frampton: Live on eight-track as I studied chemistry,
three girls in the class of twenty. At the end of the year,
the teacher gave me a calendar of writer-physicians.
It was Songs in the Key of Life on LP when I studied physics,
two girls in the class of fifteen. The teacher never looked our way.
My older friends guzzled Boone’s Farm wine, Southern Comfort.
My sister smoked cigarettes. A guy bumped into me, reeking of weed.
I flashed Dad’s purple lips at only forty, his persistent must of stale tobacco.
My rebellion was going to be bigger than any of that.
I clipped a newspaper article about how to ask a guy out.
The photo: a woman at a phonebooth, sunglasses on her head,
a little black book in one hand, the phone receiver in the other.
It was “Just the Way You Are” on FM as I dressed for the Sadie Hawkins dance.
It was “Barracuda” on cassette as I pulled on the gown for graduation.
In college I registered as chemistry pre-med. At Planned Parenthood I got the pill.
I knew what I wanted. I knew where I was going.