The Semester

Heather McNaugher

Mondays, 16 of them, I watch Roxy and Kayla fall in love.

In the workshop’s half-moon, they are outerlimits—

farthest away but acutely across from each other, the better to touch

without touching. I remember Carson, the twin bed,

the wild adolescent catastrophizing: would you rather

spend forever in separate rooms but able to talk? Or

in the same room permitted only to touch? Always

some imperial hand letting and not letting. Always

the red alert of forever. I have to speak up

and occasionally wave my arms against the roar

of their orbit. When we read Kayla’s poems

it is Roxy nodding gravely, Roxy rooting for them sagely, Roxy

for whom this will go badly. For Kayla’s is the throat,

lithe and invincible, of a new woman newly accustomed

to devotion from the big-sneakered Roxies of the world.

Kayla’s yogic knees push black denim to bursting,

her bird hand skipping the waves of her hair. Roxy brightens

to the roots of her ponytail. Returns next year without it.

Heather McNaugher is the author of System of Hideouts and two poetry chapbooks, Panic & Joy and Double Life. She teaches at Chatham University, where she is poetry editor of The Fourth River.