On Turning Sixteen
That August day, big sister and I
are standing – alone – at the bus stop.
‘I’m legal!’ I cry out. It will be another
sixteen months until this is more than bluster,
but I’ve shaken high school off like a fashion
consigned to history: the toga; leg warmers.
For today life has transformed
into a rack of stylishly-clad hangers,
different selves to try on in the changing
room of new adulthood. I rip them from
their wire skeletons, run with them in a pile,
certain I will wear them all soon enough
in the parade of great occasions life will
surely become. So much to look forward to –
trashed curfews, nightclubs, poetry read aloud
in the soft light of lovers’ lamps. And I am
still slim – everything looks great on me, like
sarcasm, optimism, swerving pregnancy. And
whilst we’re waiting at the bus stop
for the tardy bus to come, we are yet hopeful
a cousin’s teen pregnancy, another’s delinquencies
are just two ways of many; that there is some
third way for people like us. A track I
must mark out, walking alone, just a flashlight
to hold, in the mud. Still, ‘I’m legal!’ I call out again –
as if sending my jocularity ahead to brighten
the road. There will be consensual sex
and contraceptives to lighten the load. And just maybe
a bright-eyed boy, who’ll break into me gently,
as if I’m the home of someone he could love.
Merrie Joy Williams is a poet, novelist, writing tutor, and editor of prose and poetry anthologies. She was shortlisted for the 2020 Bridport Prize, longlisted for the 2020 National Poetry Competition, and is a winner of The Poetry Archive’s ‘Wordview 2020’ competition. She is the recipient of a London Writers’ Award, Arts Council England awards for poetry and fiction, and an Obsidian fellow. Merrie has appeared at The Southbank Festival, The Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival, and on BBC Radio. Poems have been published in Poetry Wales, Pree Lit, The Good Journal, The Interpreter’s House, and elsewhere. Her debut collection is Open Windows (Waterloo, 2019).
