it was the seventies when me & Karen Carpenter hung out

 

*

(cream)

me & Karen Carpenter

blu-tacked heartthrobs

to the hangout

wall & laid down

under our own gatefold

smiles. The ridges of our mouths

tasted like corduroy & the hangout

door was a polygon of un-hinged

ultra-violet. We stole lines from stones

& rolled them like acid

checkers on each

other’s tongues, testing

the discs of our tucked spines as we

swallowed. We rippled all through

the magazines: there were morsels of cosmetic

Top Tip to live on. We loaded our skin

& rubbed in the limits like cream, microscoped

for layouts of handbag & muscle. We could

not switch off the mirrors: it turned out

since me & Karen C

were kids we’d sucked on dolls cross

legged & shaved their limbs

to size with the

zip of our teeth. Somewhere

our mothers had bleach

dreams. We lay & grinned

on the oblong of leftover

shagpile. The seventies tasted

like orangeade, like groovy wars & honeybrown

explosions in the wallpaper. Karen

Carpenter held my hand & walked me

through the detonating spirals.

She showed me where

we could feast

on tangerine horizons

 

©Tracey Slaughter

 

Tracey Slaughter is the author of deleted scenes for lovers an acclaimed collection of short stories (VUP, 2016). Her poetry and prose have received many awards including the international Bridport Prize (2014), two BNZ Katherine Mansfield Awards, and the Landfall Essay Prize 2015. Her poetry cycle ‘it was the seventies when me & Karen Carpenter hung out’ was shortlisted in the Manchester Poetry Prize 2014, and her poem ‘breather’ won Second Place in the ABR Peter Porter Poetry Prize 2018. She teaches at Waikato University where she edits the journal Mayhem.