THE POETRY OF ANNA SZILAGYI

Anna Szilagyi is in her senior year studying English and women, gender, and sexuality studies at Binghamton University. She is the president of the university’s Slam Poetry Club, and facilitating their writing workshops is the highlight of her week. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Glass Mountain Literary Magazine, Bustle, and The Fem Literary Magazine. She likes to dissect topics like feminism, gender, and family stories in her poems. When she is not writing, she reads Margaret Atwood and cross stitches feminist sentiments. *** A Portrait of My Parents in 1992

I found a picture of my parents from my mother’s surprise bridal shower. I’ve heard this story from her side before– she was miserable. My mother hates surprises.

But in this photo, my parents are young and smiling, my mother with her cropped, dark hair, like Demi Moore in “Ghost.” My father looks down, his face round like a child’s. My mother wears a blouse with the sleeves rolled up and dangling earrings, my father a Florida Marlins t-shirt. They are in love for the second time.

Soon, they will elope with only their two best friends present, my mother in a cream-colored suit with a skirt–not white, but cream, to defy sexist wedding traditions. There is a picture from this day in our living room, now. They are kissing, standing on a rock, fall foliage frames their bodies.

There is no photo of my mother on the phone with my father’s mother, in tears because they broke up, or my father with his first wife, or my mother’s eternal fight with her body or their late night worry about money when they decided my mother would stay home with me and quit her job.

The frames hold the stories they’d feel comfortable telling acquaintances and neighbors we secretly hate. The frames hold people my brother and I never knew, the flawed and reckless twenty-somethings we will never know. To learn your parents are human beings is to admit they had lives before you existed, lives you will never fully learn.

There will always be gaps between the timestamped photos and the glass, or scrapbook plastic. There will always be a world where my parents lived and loved without ever thinking of me. *** Ode to My Body

This is an ode to the fluffy blonde hair on my legs at ten years old that turned dark brown on my right leg from being in a cast for six weeks. When the doctor took a sharp, buzzing razor to the plaster, he cracked it open like a clam, or a geode, but instead of a pearl or gleaming purple crystal, inside was my leg, thin and hairy and covered in dead skin. My mother couldn’t wait until we got home. She took a brown paper towel and wet it, then started scrubbing away at my shin.

This is a praise of my uneven legs. At a regular yearly check up, the doctor declared one of my legs one quarter of an inch shorter than the other. This caused a slight curve in my spine, as if someone pulled up an “S” and stretched it. A shoemaker carved me a small lift to place in my shoe to straighten the bend. No one could tell it was there, not even me.

This is a prayer to my twelve-year-old growth-spurt body. Like a puppy, my head and hands looked too big for the lanky rest of me. The skinny jeans that came in that season fit perfectly, though I hoped for a chest that needed more than a training bra, that was ready to move on to full-time work.

And a prayer to the softness that came after, that my mother called “a woman’s body,” the weight scientists say is necessary in order for women to ovulate. To the prickly skin in-between shaves. To the soft hair I let grow in-between shaves. To the sweat marks on my clothes and the pink acne scars that refuse to fade. To the body I have been learning my whole life. I am still getting to know you.

***

Suburban Witchery

At girlhood sleepovers, we’d play games. Not like makeovers, or truth or dare. We’d recite the story–

I don’t know where we first heard it, someone’s older sister or cousin or friend from another school had the legend passed down to them.

One of us would lie on her stomach, and from above, another girl would tell the story.

That wolves or rabid dogs were chasing you through dark woods. You were stumbling over branches and roots trying to get away. You ran as fast as you could, but the wolves caught up.

She would say this in whispers, both because the parents were asleep by now and because it was scarier that way.

And we’d lift up the other girl’s pajama shirt, the one lying down, eyes closed, dreaming of running through woods, and she’d have red scratches on her back. Pink lines from where the dogs’ claws scratched her. We didn’t know how or why this happened, only that it worked.

This magic, our witchery under the suburban night, our quiet 2 a.m. hauntings. At this hour, anything was possible.

By morning, her skin would be unscathed. In all that daylight, the mothers clutching car keys as we finished our pancakes, we spoke nothing of the wolves, only shared sly, syrupy smiles and trudged out to the car, still in our pajamas.

***

Heaven

When I die, I want to go to my idea of heaven. I want to meet every author whose words my fingers touched in awe and thank them. I want to watch dogs who were once sick play in a field together. I’d see elderly couples who died within days of each other renew their vows and listen to the songs of long-gone crooners.

And I would make it there, somehow, though the crown of my head was never bathed in holy water and I can count on one hand how many times I’ve seen the inside of a church. This place only exists in my head, but isn’t that faith at its finest?

When my body burns to ash, I will feel nothing. I will already be somewhere else. I hope my spirit will be the apprentice to another, wiser ghost, and she will teach me how to haunt, benevolently. Not the cliche techniques– no turning lights on and off or cooling down a warm room. I will drift through walls like nothing and watch my loved ones grieve and smile over them, and they will feel it, but dismiss that feeling.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” they’ll say. “I’m being stupid.”

I might resemble a ball of light or a wisp of smoke. I might find a home in a stranger’s house and make myself comfortable. I think of this when I know I do not want to believe in nothing. I think of my heaven and my body as air and everything else shrinks down so small I can barely see it