Oh, to be Friendly

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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.

 

 

 

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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.