FIFTEEN IN YERINGTON, NEVADA
By Courtney Cliften
The smell of wet dirt and onions from the Perry Farm
constricts the entire town with undistributed wealth,
masks the crystal, chemical-mixture stink
from tiny apartments chalked throughout the streets.
Children ride bikes down Main street
to buried jars of coins saved for hot summer days
and Chevron Slushies. Every Friday, the back row
of the movie theater takes the virginity
of another adolescent, and another name is Sharpied
on the second stall door of the women’s bathroom.
I learn to hate my mother, start 7am arguments on principle,
learn to scrub eyeliner clean in the high school bathroom
before coming home. I learn chugging perfume
doesn’t hide the scent of alcohol on breath, and that a boy
will light my cigarette first if he thinks I’m pretty.
I wear the bathing suit that’s one skipped-rock-ripple
away from exposed nipple because when church men
say my body is a temple, I promise mine
is more like the abandoned slaughterhouse by the river—
spray painted in swear words and littered with empty beer cans.
After dark, we drive out toward the dairy farms,
kiss each other through the smoke of miniature cigars,
and when boys kill rabbits in the alfalfa fields,
I’m not surprised to feel nothing.
Courtney Cliften was raised in the Nevada desert. She’s current faculty at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she received her MFA in poetry. Her poems have appeared in The Meadow, Helen Literary Magazine, An Anthology of Emerging Poets, The Hunger, The Racket, Caustic Frolic, and more.
Photo courtesy of Courtney Cliften.