Footsteps, Heartbeat, Fire, Voice
| Naomi Kimbell
You would have been pressed neat in pants, a white blouse, and oxford shoes. Or portrait pretty in a dress, cardigan, and cuffed socks, even after the long school day. Only twelve, the scent of Ivory still at your collar, you would have walked home alone to the projects with your hair in place, pinned at the temples, holding an empty lunch box and carrying books tucked into your arms. This is my belief about you, that once you were bud and bract, furled not clenched, new. A phantom girl grown from what small stories you told as you brushed my hair in our bathroom where steam, honeyed with Jean Naté and Tone soap, clung to the window and the mirror and our skin, summered and sweet and heady. These things you wanted me to know: You stored your white gloves in plastic. You made your own clothes. And I should be glad you didn’t hit me with the brush when I complained that it pulled. In 1 954, you, Carole Joyce Bubash, walked home from school carrying your books and your lunch box. Your hard soled shoes clacked on the pavement and you liked that sound. In the high smelting town at the base of the Pintlers, school year wind was sharp and cold and you usually buttoned your coat to your chin. But sometimes you didn’t button it at all, and let it flap instead like a woolen cape behind you as you walked. That you also likedMthe feeling of flightMand the buffeting pull of near winter in thin air, the promise of snow on treeless peaks against a sky so high it was always clear, always breaking light to perfect blue. Out of the schoolyard and into the street, you faced the men. Perched on pavement 40