Simply 21
- Simply 21
Wearing white is all it takesfor memory to snag melike some dopey fish,for the decades to slip and settleinto the low-key centerof my twenty-first.
A sister just old enough(with parental permission)our friendship in the wingsbiding time, gaining trust.A brother who had yet to makethe worst kind of bad choice,his vanity still a strangerto mutant cells.
A baby (incredibly mine)somewhere in the background,perfect dreamless sleephers alone.A husband I would take backtwice in five years thennever again.
Friends loyally fixed in time,celebratingin the flattering light.Conflicting truths unimaginable.
It was 1985.Someone gave me a bottleof Kahlua.Pop music was trying to feedEthiopia. [End Page 65]
A hole in the ozone layerhad just been discovered.Orwell's year of Big Brotherhad come and goneand stayed.
I could not know thenhow much of life is spentstriving to bridge the gapsbetween the tenses,between the indefinite waitto grow upand the missed opportunityof a blinked eye.
I was simply twenty-one,between perms,a coral-pink smile risingabove the collar of my whitecheesecloth dress. [End Page 66]
Jane Williams is an award-winning poet and writer based in Tasmania. Widely published and anthologized since the early 1990s, Williams has been a featured reader at numerous venues and festivals in Australia and in countries including the United States, Ireland, Malaysia, and the Czech Republic. In 2016, she held a three-month residency in Štúrovo, Slovakia, and poems developed during this time comprise part of her sixth and most recent collection, Parts of the Main (Ginninderra Press, 2017). She coedits the online literary and arts journal Communion.
