Remembering Our First Parties

remembering the boys—
much older, only unsettling
in hindsight

back then, they gave us
beers and we took them,
uncertain in the summer

of sage and honey.
we hid in the bathroom
so we could talk

for a while, swimming in the empty
bathtub and watching each
other’s reflections in the mirror.

the boys waited outside
in the yard, and we let them

wait while we were fifteen
and silver-tongued, all shoulder-
blades and hummingbird and safe
for now

Copyright © 2023 by Erin Rose Coffin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 20, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I wrote this poem in the summer of 2018, when I was living in Brooklyn. I was doing a draft-a-day exercise with my close friends from graduate school, and several of the words in this poem were from a prompt that one of them sent. I’m grateful for the gift of language that allows for surprises in my own work. I was also very homesick that summer. I spent a lot of time reflecting on how lucky I was in my girlhood (and beyond) to find people and places that felt safe, that kept everything on the other side of the threshold at bay.”
—Erin Rose Coffin