to try & burn
and all across this great country, seventeen-year-old girls
are reading Kerouac for the first time, turning on to try and burn.
— Sarah Zoe Mondt
at fifteen we were unfinished & glorious; a snarl of skinnylegs, muddy hair, dirty elbows, skinned knees & dreams of escape from the sort of lives our parents had plotted out for us / we were drawn to songs that seared our skin & goosepimpled it, the bonebreak beat of hardcore drums & the sizzle of loudfastrules guitar, everything at maximum volume; we were drawn to books about drugs, kicks, wild wildness—we ignored the way those boys treated chicks like us because we saw our selves in the movement of their bodies, go man go they said & so / we did, shot ourselves back & forth halfway across america, from the mid-atlantic alleys graffitied with history to the quaint smalltowns of the upper midwest / along the way left crime scenes of red & black hair dye in roadside bathrooms, pierced each other’s noses with safety pins & felt hip for a week or two until the wounds festered, turned tender & hot to the touch; along the way we kissed boys & girls in the dank-dark bathrooms of punk clubs, & yet imagined all the real adventures we’d have one day when we were all grown up / we made each other braver; I taught her to tear down her walls or at least put a gate in, I who fell in love ten times a day & gave myself to any girl or boy who crooked their fingers & offered a wink or a beer to my illegal self; she gave me permission to hook a thumb and catch a passing car, to rip my jeans on the barbed tops of keepout fences, taught me how to bust open / the padlocks on abandoned buildings and break into construction sites where we hunted ghosts & sprayed our feral names & o we were best beat bloodbrothers & psychic punkrock sisters of the soul; this was all a whole person-who-can-legally-drink ago so why do I yet write odes to these still-sore pangs, the toothy aches of my younger yearning? because because because / no matter the miles I’ve kissed & the bodies I’ve travelled, no matter the girls & boys, girlboys, boygirls I’ve handed my photocopied heart to, she’s the one that owns / the original; I remember her in my twin bed, fingers twined in mine, as we read aloud, Kerouac & Ginsberg, us two madgirls who burned burned burned like the lighters we used to blaze our popcan weedpipes & holy / the peachfuzz of her teenaged legs, holy our lips touching on the French inhale, holy our heartbeats and the howling explosion of our becoming.
Jessie Lynn McMains (they/them) is a multi-genre writer. Their writing has appeared or is forthcoming in many publications, including Okay Donkey, Petrichor, Tiny Essays, Moonchild Magazine, and Barnhouse. They are the author of several chapbooks, most recently The Girl With the Most Cake and forget the fuck away from me. They were the recipient of the 2019 Hal Prize for poetry, and were the 2015-2017 Poet Laureate of Racine, WI. They are editor/publisher of Bone & Ink Press. You can find their website at recklesschants.net, or find them on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram @rustbeltjessie.