Summer in Kansas City by Yinka Rose Reed-Nolan

Summer in Kansas City

Once I thought I saw you at a convention center in Kansas City
standing atop an escalator, typing away at words to be sent
across airwaves. When we were kids, the Internet was still new.
After school we shared our lives on the World Wide Web,
sent each other AOL instant messages, stayed up late
in Yahoo chat rooms, avoided eating dinner. In the mornings
we traded fashion magazines, “thinspiration,” in the quad before school.
I sat behind you in Mr. Riley’s English class, braided your hair,
called you a fat-ass when he made you take off your puffer.
Once when I asked you where we would be in 10 years
you said that I’d be dead. I wore your words like a badge of honor,
as if being sick was a place of power. The only place you wanted to be
was thin. I taught you to hide the bones you saw as flabby, fed you diet pills,
admired your anorexic skin too young to fall loose from dehydration.
For your 16th birthday I gave you a letter in a bottle. Don't open it
until you're 26, I said, as if that were an eternity. You used to
wear your hair chin length and layered, but time and humidity
have a way of ruining things – making them grow longer and limp.
Summer is hot in Kansas City where heat sticks to you like honey,
like a 3 letter word, like fat, where it hangs from your body like the past
leaving you thirsty and wanting resolution. But what words are there to say
about a past I no longer feel guilty for? In a future where I no longer feel
anything, it seems apologies have been wasted. Once I thought
I saw you at a convention center in Kansas City, but Facebook tells me
time has changed you. And if you cared, Facebook would tell you, although
unconvincingly, I am still alive.


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Image - Emily Kneeter
www.flickr.com/photos/emilykneeter/
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/



Bio: Yinka Rose Reed-Nolan holds a MFA from California State University, Fresno, and is currently pursuing her PhD at Binghamton University. Yinka's chapbook 'First Crush' is forthcoming from Hyacinth Girl Press. Her nonfiction and poetry have appeared in Bloom, Brickplight, Foliate Oak, Niche, and The Dying Goose.