PRISM is excited to share this wonderful poem, “The Great Minnesota Get-Together” by Ginger Ayla from our 62.2 issue, available for purchase now.
The Great Minnesota Get-Together
Truth? I’m chickenshit. Like it’s my stretch marks snaking upriver to God. My belly escaping a crop top. My faux-pas. It’s August, so hot. My friends and I sit in the grass, snap photos, eat red-blue snow cones. Middle-Aged-Crop-Top-Woman takes the stage. How brave! She conducts electricity, her skin sparking lightning. Everywhere people eat fried alligator on sticks. Buckets of cookies the size of a cow’s head. Middle-Aged-Crop-Top-Woman is going to blow my cover. My sweater in summer. I have them nearly convinced this body doesn’t exist, and now here she is. Our sweet smiles melt. R says, Look at her rolls and I revert to my most invertebrate version, wander the crowd in search of a magician, a clown, a stilt-walker—someone who can twist me a balloon in the shape of a backbone. And that’s when I see the medium. She’s perched over a small table. Sit, she says. Tarot? I ask, pointing to the stack on the table. I dressed as a fortune teller for Halloween last year. Borrowed my mom’s Rider-Waite deck. She wraps her shawl around her shoulders and finally says: No. These cards are about you. She flips them face up. My first kiss and the sting of his chapped lips. My grandma and I finding a garter snake, a lump in its gut: Should we cut it open, see what it ate? My mother Spidora, father Strongman. My fat ass proudly biting into the best chicken sandwich in Tennessee, telling the apologetic waitress how worth the wait. My friends over on the grass, laughing at Middle-Aged-Crop-Top-Woman who—the next card reveals—is also me, thirty years from now. I knew it, I say, immediately seeing the resemblance.
Ginger Ayla (she/her) is a writer and poet who lives in Colorado. She’s a grant writer by day and also teaches and volunteers with The Poetry Lab. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Phoebe, Grist, Cleaver, Heavy Feather Review, Ghost City Review, Sky Island Journal, and elsewhere.