Oh, to be Friendly
Brianna Allen
Something about the girls
with lemon line hair
chewing on the sour strands
makes a boy’s tongue unravel,
but not in the baby blue type of way
because high school diplomas take away
those splotching flushing cheeks,
like the kind that triggers
giggling in the middle of math exams and lips
with layers of strawberry menthol,
and turns them into creased grins that
you’ll see in the dark because,
at a certain age, relationships can’t be
female and male
when it comes to
pushing each other down hills on skates
without the expectation of a kiss or embrace
since the world doesn’t grow trees with
tampon strings hanging off them,
and it sucks because sometimes pressing your knee
against his, with the itch of leg hairs
sparking static through yearning skin,
can have a connotation that isn’t related to
a picture of a bee soaking itself into a
pink and sopping flower, but jokes about screwing
your best friend seems so much more important so–
to Hell with it all.
Brianna Allen, class of 2024, majors in English with a minor in creative writing. She is currently from Runnemede, NJ. She wrote this piece in Joanna Fuhrman’s creative writing poetry class in the spring of 2022, when she treated every written poem as a feeling rather than an assignment. Furhman selected the piece for inclusion in WHR.