TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

In 1994 I was seventeen: my daughter’s age! I remember that as a time when I was trying to figure out who I was. But to some degree we’re always trying to figure that out, aren’t we? 

Today’s poem is set in 1994, a formative year for the speaker, too.

My 1994
by Stephanie Burt

I didn’t know. But I knew. I took off the dress
Kay offered and apologized for my striped boxers.

I called myself a kid in a candy store 
When I was a teen in a lingerie store. I wanted

To move to a place I knew secondhand, from TV,
To Top Shop, Boots, postcodes in England-land. I had mixed up

The opposite of nostalgia—a longing to be 
Some place I could never call home—with my wish

To become someone new. There’s a wasp between
My windowpane and its wire-mesh screen. She wants

To get out. She hovers and dives toward some
Way, not knowing there can be no

Way unless someone unlocks the glass and lifts
The window itself and lets the wasp into the room.

For you  read me.  I wanted to write a book and I told
Everybody I knew that I wanted to write a book

About the softest pop groups I could find:
The boys wore striped sailor shirts and they sang

Like girls and the girls wore striped sailor dresses and sang
Like every first kiss was simultaneously

The Holy Grail and no big deal, which was true
And is true. The Field Mice. Heavenly. Blueboy. I loved

Them all. I love them all. The demand that we shed
Our previous selves is garbage. We are not wasps

And need not leave our shells behind. I had 
To move to England to see them where they lived.

You say love could break a boy’s heart,
Keith Girdler sang. I said there’s no such thing.

I wore the sailor shirts but not the floppy collars.
My then-best friend gave me bad advice about passing,

Telling me women dress for one another. 
Never for ourselves. My then-girlfriend needed

To date a boy. I was glad to help her find one.
I didn’t know. But I knew. Maybe everyone did.

The wasp rams the glass, black and gold. I thought I wanted
To free myself from my body, which was 

Not possible. Land
On this windowsill with me.

"My 1994" by Stephanie Burt from WE ARE MERMAIDS © 2022 Stephanie Burt. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press.