My Near Enemy
At fourteen, Rosie
would phone my house
audibly pounding her fist, saying if she saw me
on the street she would come after me,
"go for the face." At twelve,
she’d helped me to find breath
for my own anger, those displaced years,
teaching me to smoke, to rub rosemary shrub
on my fingers on the way home,
to shoplift from the Family Mart
across from school.
Rosie specialized
in cool, her mother dead of cancer
by the time she turned six.
During the week their housekeeper
cooked pancake dinners for her and her brother,
while we sprayed strawberry air freshener
around the living room
to hide the smell of cheap weed
and gin pilfered from her father's stash.
I bloomed under her tutelage.
She monitored the length
of my pants, the vehemence
of my nonchalance.
Incisive as a heron's beak
among the stalks of conscience
she reached in for the root
of my terror, held it dangling by the tail.
In the silence that squats
between lost children,
my dear enemy, my mortal
friend, I yielded and beheld that hated,
squirming thing.
would phone my house
audibly pounding her fist, saying if she saw me
on the street she would come after me,
"go for the face." At twelve,
she’d helped me to find breath
for my own anger, those displaced years,
teaching me to smoke, to rub rosemary shrub
on my fingers on the way home,
to shoplift from the Family Mart
across from school.
Rosie specialized
in cool, her mother dead of cancer
by the time she turned six.
During the week their housekeeper
cooked pancake dinners for her and her brother,
while we sprayed strawberry air freshener
around the living room
to hide the smell of cheap weed
and gin pilfered from her father's stash.
I bloomed under her tutelage.
She monitored the length
of my pants, the vehemence
of my nonchalance.
Incisive as a heron's beak
among the stalks of conscience
she reached in for the root
of my terror, held it dangling by the tail.
In the silence that squats
between lost children,
my dear enemy, my mortal
friend, I yielded and beheld that hated,
squirming thing.
Clara McLean lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area. Earlier poems have appeared in Rattle, Cider Press Review, Terrain.org, Foglifter, Bird’s Thumb, and Berkeley Poetry Review, among others.
Art: Molly Dunham