The First Time
Me and Ant shirtless at the corner of Sanford
and St. Paul, straddling our bikes, watching Snooks
pace bow-legged in the gutter – Yeah man, I mean,
you wouldn’t believe this chick, man – scuffing
at the No Dumping plate epoxied to the curb
with the toe of his high-top – It was like nothing
I ever felt – Ant and me following the jut of the older
boy’s chin to what looks like a translucent balloon
lying slack at the bottom of the storm drain.
Nineteen-ninety-nine and the most brutal summer
on record, the water ban parching every ball field
for three counties. The old men who play rummy
in the shade of a stunted box elder have folded up
their lawn chairs and gone inside. The street
is mostly empty – just stillness and heat
and Snooks going on about this girl who just moved
to town and has tits out to here – a girl who doesn’t
know about Snooks yet, his casanova complex
and his big mouth, how he would dog any female
who would let him – a girl who doesn’t know
about this town, the legless vets hanging around
the Army-Navy, catcalling public school girls,
the True Gospel Pentecostal women handing out
pamphlets in denim skirts and turtlenecks, the fake
fifties diner on Middle Turnpike where kids get blitzed
in the parking lot and fistfight until the cops show up.
I mean it when I say I’m thirteen and sick
of this place, sick of Snooks, his acned swagger,
the scuff of his hand-me-down Nikes on the curb.
But when Ant taps my shoulder and turns to go,
I don’t move. I stand here on the corner, a quick ride
from home, the still-slick condom catching light
in the storm drain, the blacktop radiating heat.
I lay my bike on its side. I step closer to get a good look.
and St. Paul, straddling our bikes, watching Snooks
pace bow-legged in the gutter – Yeah man, I mean,
you wouldn’t believe this chick, man – scuffing
at the No Dumping plate epoxied to the curb
with the toe of his high-top – It was like nothing
I ever felt – Ant and me following the jut of the older
boy’s chin to what looks like a translucent balloon
lying slack at the bottom of the storm drain.
Nineteen-ninety-nine and the most brutal summer
on record, the water ban parching every ball field
for three counties. The old men who play rummy
in the shade of a stunted box elder have folded up
their lawn chairs and gone inside. The street
is mostly empty – just stillness and heat
and Snooks going on about this girl who just moved
to town and has tits out to here – a girl who doesn’t
know about Snooks yet, his casanova complex
and his big mouth, how he would dog any female
who would let him – a girl who doesn’t know
about this town, the legless vets hanging around
the Army-Navy, catcalling public school girls,
the True Gospel Pentecostal women handing out
pamphlets in denim skirts and turtlenecks, the fake
fifties diner on Middle Turnpike where kids get blitzed
in the parking lot and fistfight until the cops show up.
I mean it when I say I’m thirteen and sick
of this place, sick of Snooks, his acned swagger,
the scuff of his hand-me-down Nikes on the curb.
But when Ant taps my shoulder and turns to go,
I don’t move. I stand here on the corner, a quick ride
from home, the still-slick condom catching light
in the storm drain, the blacktop radiating heat.
I lay my bike on its side. I step closer to get a good look.
“The First Time” was originally published in and has been reprinted here with permission of the author.
Edgar Kunz lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he’s the Third Year Poetry Fellow at Vanderbilt University. He has been awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize and was a finalist for the 2014 Driftless Prize. New work can be found in Redivider, Indiana Review, The Journal, Passages North, AGNI, Devil’s Lake, and Forklift, Ohio.
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