Missing Out
This author is a recipient
of the Sigma Tau Delta Award
Emily Kingery
is the author of Invasives (Finishing Line Press, 2023) and the recipient of several honors in poetry and prose. Her work appears widely in journals. She teaches English at St. Ambrose University and serves on the Board of Directors at the Midwest Writing Center, a non-profit supporting writers in the Quad Cities community (mwcqc.org). Read more of her work at emilykingery.com.
We ate at Olive Garden. We wore dresses in
taffetas stained with punches spiked with
prescriptions, threw punches in tuxedos.
We nursed 24-packs in the after-prom backs
of trucks backed up to fires, our faces lit,
our hair warped into horns from hairspray
and hardness of backseat sleep. We were old
and too young to foresee we would do this
ten, twenty years into our beaten little lives
and send our CD and VHS lies to Salvation Army
for you. You, and your children, too, will pose
under cardboard stars, order cheap pancakes
the morning after, and you won’t have time
or cameras enough to spin that straw into
gold or a bed to dream on. Good luck trying
not going to the cool kid’s house where we
still wash our livers clean of use. It’s a party
you can’t miss. No one ever misses a thing.