Jennifer Saunders

Ode to My Alternate History

I want to go back now—to take everything I know
at fifty and pour it into that girl
the way we used to drill a quarter-sized hole
into a watermelon rind and fill the fruit
with vodka, the sweet ripe flesh soaking it up
and burying the sting so we got spinning drunk
just off the sweetness. Or even further back, sixteen,
on the beach, just outside the glow of the bonfire,
just enough in the shadows to think nobody could see
his fingers working in my jeans. What I could do now
with that boy, with that girl’s body,
with the night and the bonfire and the shadows,
with his fingers, how I could cast a net of pleasure
across both of us. I know how to say
yes now and mean it, I know the difference
between gift and theft.
That watermelon ripe body I didn’t know
what to do with. I didn’t know
I could have turned those boys inside out,
didn’t even know I could have turned myself
inside out. I could have straddled those boys,
their jeans tangled at their knees,
could have ridden my own pleasure like a horse,
could have said, I want you to touch me like this.
Could have said, put your hands over your head,
could have said, let’s make each other shine.
Look at the moonlight rippling on the lake.
God, I could have said, wouldn’t it be great to shine like that?

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Jennifer Saunders is the author of Self-Portrait with Housewife (Tebot Bach, 2019), winner of the 2017 Clockwise Chapbook Competition. She is a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Orison Anthology nominee and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Grist, Ninth Letter, The Shallow Ends, Stirring and elsewhere. Jennifer holds an MFA from Pacific University and lives in German-speaking Switzerland, where in the winters she teaches skating in a hockey school.