It’s the Summer of Love and your period is late

 

It’s the Summer of Love and your period is late

We are college kids 
flowers in our hair 
bicycling through Oregon 
to Frisco or bust.

We cruise Tillamook 
as if a different life, 
tour the cheese factory, 
charmed by the town 
with cows along the road
calm in their cuds.

Maybe it’s a message from the bovine 
but your breasts, you say, 
are more tender now.
We are in love but not ready 
for the Big If.

Camping at Cape Lookout with 
hot showers, toweling wet hair, 
you return grinning because 
you are very not pregnant, you say.
End of an era, beginning of a period.

When finally we pedal into the Haight, 
summer’s end, it’s a strung-out scene 
selling no joy. Frisco’s a bust. You say 
We lost something in that shower drain.

To the airport, eastward, 
steam-heat classrooms for us. 
Rain, fresh green grass for Tillamook.

…..

First published in Monterey Poetry Review
Dr. Jennifer Lagier Fellguth, editor

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