Mata Hari Dress

For Elizabeth Hatmaker

I need to get this right. 

Normal, Illinois: The summer I thought the groundhogs were prairie dogs popping up all over the field between my apartment and the public pool. The pool a linguistic device, the water never touching us, though it did try. Damn those midwestern summers were hot. You wore that dress like metadiscourse, endophora staining the white tile gold. (Edit: Mata Hari never wore paisley, never wore a sundress with clogs while reading student papers at a party) Like whack-a-mole, popping up here and over there so try to keep up. The sun in our eyes, irradiating us, our toxicity gorgeous, our shared force field emitting a hum inaudible to human ears. (Edit: I can’t tell them it was makeup I spilled on their drafts, you said. Coffee, even liquor, but makeup evokes sad girl, gold shag carpet, OJ trial on every night.) After you were gone we finished your page proofs and he opened the closet door and said, take what you want

(Edits: add sunblock, add a swim in the pool, make the stain Cherry Heering, make the squirrels prairie dogs, take the Mata Hari dress even though it will never fit me)

Did you play the best friend in that movie? A stranger asked me. It was a romantic comedy, and I did not. (Edit: say yes.) 

Take it. Bring it back to New Hampshire like everything else. 

(Edit: code gloss here) About the prairie dogs, I never said it out loud (Edit: would you?) That was the first summer we were friends. I played the best friend. That seems important but I’m not sure where it goes. I’m not sure where any of it went but the right words in the right order will bring it back, or so I hear. 

I want the dress, you know the one

Eye of the Day, they called her. But you knew this.

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Kirsti Sandy teaches creative writing at Keene State College. Her essay collection, She Lived and the Other Girls Died, was awarded the Monadnock Essay Collection Prize in 2018 and her essay, “I Have Come for What Belongs to Me” won the Raven Prize for Nonfiction. Her work can be found in Split Lip, the Boiler, Under the Gum Tree, Hole in the Head Review, and Natural Bridge, among other journals. She raises and breeds fancy chickens and loves Morgan horses and she is just about as Generation X as you get.