Sadie McCarney
and this airplane’s the size of an aphid who’ll prey on the fresh condos of suburban Boston; 13 and I’m wearing my too-big jeans, stinky and inked over in ballpoint pen; 13 and my suitcase is packed with Nair and tarot I pretend I can use; 13 and I predict her hair will already be greying and unwashed yet perfect; 13 and she’ll smoke the stubs of clove cigarettes snug in black wrappers like jackets; 13 and I’ll tell the whole room I drink as I take my very first swig of liquor; 13 and I’ll ache to be dared to kiss her; 13 and she’ll say she’s been to alternate states on LSD, on coke, on speed; 13 and there will never be an alternate Massachusetts where I do not love her; 13 and I won’t know much about hormones but I’ll understand kabooms and chemical reactions; 13 and I’ll nurse a chemical burn from the Nair I only slather on to impress her; 13 and the outdoor summer stock theatre will be so hot someone faints in front of us; 13 and she’ll be that hot, too, but right now this airplane’s so small my limbs are tucked in for rescue, and with my square inch of space I pull a Bic from my pocket and colour a blue-black heart on my jeans (keeping the warm pen snug in my hand) because I don’t know any of this, yet: I’m 13 and flying for the very first time and I don’t know what it feels like to land.
Sadie McCarney is an emerging Atlantic Canadian poet who has been a finalist for the Walrus Poetry Prize, The Malahat Review Far Horizons Award for Poetry, and the Prairie Fire Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in publications including Grain, Room, The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, Plenitude, and The Puritan, and also in The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2015 and The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry in English. Live Ones, Sadie’s first full-length book, is forthcoming from the University of Regina Press.
