Two Poems by Mary Christine Delea

Finally. A Poem about Hickeys.

Wait.

I, too, am trying to figure out their meaning, these sucking marks endemic in the world of adolescents, the breaking of capillaries just under the skin on the neck and chest, these love bites that don’t hurt.

Theories:
A sign of ownership.
A natural reaction at a hormonally-driven time when, anxious about sex, teens regress to the desire to suck on their mothers’ breasts, using a substitute for both mother and breast.
An animal instinct akin to mating male mammals clamping their teeth into the necks, without cutting, of their partners.
One more way to piss off parents or, if not caught, another secret kept from them.

Hickeys don’t scar.

They don’t remain and are never  photographed for prosperity, like the broken arm on a ski trip or the newly landscaped back yard. They are left in the world of notes passed on the sly, four hour phone calls talking with someone seen only hours before in the hall,
and freak-outs over acne.

Honestly, I cannot explain them to any degree that would elucidate.

I am just a poet, decades
passed adolescence.

So I just say:
hickeys?

They are unexplored, not academic, never evolving, just a beginning to more, always an understudy that no one bothers to study.

The Things Old People Remember about Their Youths

Playing with dolls made from sticks and threads in a California migrant camp, tasting your own pee in secret because you’d overheard some man say to your father that it would soon come to folks drinking urine just to stay alive. You were disgusted, but thought you’d start early to get used to the taste.

Visiting an uncle dying in the gas ward in Connecticut decades after Armistice Day, and in seeing him, seeing all the other men who had been teenagers
during the war lying in pain, in beds that were no more than cots. As awful as they looked, as scary as their moans were, what you feared most was that the stench would make you puke.

Seeing your parents lie to a lynch mob about where a distant cousin was one night, knowing he was hiding in a field, then helping your mom collect money from the neighbors to get him from Alabama to Chicago. And how that cousin, then a man, cried with relief when he boarded the bus three towns away.

Watching from the house as Mr. Schneider’s barn burned and hearing what seemed like the whole town cheer as the flames got bigger. Knowing that man’s crime was being Jewish in Texas. Feeling ashamed when your father came home late that night, proud and smelling of smoke and gasoline.

Overhearing an older brother tell the priest back home in New York about the shame he felt seeing fellow American servicemen raping women in Europe. Seeing he wasn’t believed because our boys would never do that. Not really caring, because the war was finally over—Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito were defeated—and your brother was home. But caring enough that you remember for decades, disgust and fear and relief and shame all mixed up and all of it so deep you cry when you tell your daughter.