Sparkler

Driving around listening to “Cosmic Love,”
I decide to share a story from the summer

I turned sixteen, on the South Shore with an ex,
spending the night in a basement bedroom

with his best friend and her boyfriend,
my ex and I reaching for each other in the dark

while this album played in the background,
“Cosmic Love” coming on as he came inside me

and I wondered if his friends were really sleeping.

-

The memory brings me to another from the same
summer, same ex’s eighteenth birthday party.

After sunset his mom poured us shots of
birthday cake vodka and chocolate liqueur.

We lit sparklers and danced in the grass.

Might have been my first drunk night.

An ex of my ex’s arrived,
stumbling out of a taxi,
drunk from another party.

Later that night I sat on the edge
of a bathtub, rubbing my ex’s ex’s
back while they vomited into a toilet,
between heaves saying, “you’re judging me,
you’re judging me,” because I was,
and me saying, “I’m sixteen.”

But before that more shots and dancing,
my ex’s mom trying to leave though she was drunk,
all of us searching for her driver’s license.

Someone paused the music.
We searched in the grass in the dark backyard.

I walked away from the group
and found not her driver’s license
but one of the sparklers.

I looked down at it on the ground
and because I was sixteen, drunk for the first time,
because I wanted desperately to be reckless with my life,
because I thought if I wanted to write I needed to risk,

I reached for the sparkler,

wrapped my hand around it,

and let go.

-

I don’t remember the burn
but I remember after,
stumbling away from the sparkler,
its shape singed into my palm,
and immediately stepping on
what I’d been looking for,

the license, how I tucked it deep in my pocket
and made my way back.