Chigger Chug

by KALE HENSLEY

Little girl, there is a particular way this world wants you
to hurl. You must keep hunger as a diadem upon your head.
But where I am from, you learn early how to throw yourself
downhill; speak in spirals, hatch lavish and crush dandelion
under unbloomed breast. It goes a little like this: get on in,
join the line, the delight, the two-by-two as the Bible sighed.
We girls at church camp adore this initiation, a blunt rolling
horizontal over weeds or the occasional drunken bumblebee.
Oh death, here is your sting. Once a girl puts herself to goin’, 
she cannot be stopped—happily the world becomes a big fat 
bleed, just for you, just for me. When I find finally, when I sit 
up, the girls rush to tug the burrs from my hair, from skin. Oh, 
what I wouldn’t give to itch like that again.