1981

Can puberty inch toward us in a song?
For twelve weeks Sheena Easton’s “Morning Train”
snakes up the charts—her banshee cry so strong,
its stab of joy keeps rippling through my brain.
I hear it while I’m playing Centipede                                   
at the roller rink. Through strobes of colored rain
I weave into the crowd and pick up speed,
noticing boys who take their girlfriends’ hands—
the lather of their corduroy stampede
so musky with new fur and bulging glands.
A sophomore, gliding thoughtless as a swan,
hops and spins round to face me as he lands,
as though he’s trying to pass me a baton.
O Sheena, does he know which track I’m on?

David Southward teaches in the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author of two collections—Bachelor’s Buttons (Kelsay Books 2020) and Apocrypha (Wipf & Stock 2018)—and two-time winner of the Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. Read more at davidsouthward.com.