All About It

He looked like sullied laundry, which is to say
Jeff Clark, which is to say the scrubby field
where Jeff Clark took me when I was 5 and he 13
to teach me, as he put it, how to hump.

Jeff didn’t take my clothes off, or his for that matter,
or stick any one of his parts into any one of mine.
He just led me out into the first light of November
where even I suspected we should not have come.

He said, “I bet you don’t know anything,” and I told him
“I know all about it,” and he said, “Show me then.”
So I did to him what my brother had described.
It must have looked ridiculous — this thin-boned child

in wrinkled corduroys and mittens, pumping
her intrepid hips against the dawn of 1975.
I know it is wrong for me to smile when thinking on it.
But it is my memory. I’ll do what I want.

Mary Crockett Hill
“This Is the World” appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, and A Theory of Everything (Autumn House Press, 2009).