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We are a public forum committed to collective reasoning and the imagination of a more just world. Join today to help us keep the discussion of ideas free and open to everyone, and enjoy member benefits like our quarterly books.
The good girls are the ones who are interviewed by the BBC
50 years after they didn’t sleep with their boyfriends,
who themselves, shortly after the non-act, either (1)
plummeted into the sea and were or were not rescued or
(2) didn’t; possibly returning to father four or five tow-haired children,
all of whom grew up and appalled mum and da with their wild wild ways.
I bet there were also bad girls, seams geometrically straight,
hair bobbed just so, white-gloved, heeled,
ready to walk out into the barley, eager even.
Bad girls and bad boys, who woke on a warm afternoon,
itchy with stubble, to find an inscrutable Shropshire ewe watching them,
calm as though the city behind her were not on fire.
Judy Smith McDonough’s poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Indiana Review, Mississippi Valley Review, Phoebe, Prairie Journal, Snakeskin, and elsewhere.
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