Pee Poem

Day two of a music festival, in the dirt
with my sister, barefoot, playing
with flowers, fiddling with grass,
making bracelets from the longest strands.

A swaying boy walks by and says,
look at all these people
sitting in piles of piss and we pause
look down at our feet, fingers, potentially
piss covered parts, and laugh.

He is not wrong. Whether him
or a frantic squirrel or a skittish dear,
we are almost certainly sitting
in the exact location of someone's piss

but we don’t get up. We return
to the reddish leaf, lie back to stare at the clouds,
let our hair mingle with the ground
and all it has absorbed.

We are high on the woods
the way we used to be, drunk on the dirt
pooling under our toenails. We giggle
a bird’s chirp, ask each other big
questions that make us feel small.

For one day I let myself be dirty,
toss my shoes and dance in spilled beer,
admire the sap’s black ink covering my thighs.
When my sister hugs me,
I don’t flinch, my arms exposed,
stomach rippling over my shorts.

We share a plate of nachos and lick
melted cheese from unwashed fingers,
hold hands and duck into porta potties.

We are not two women recovered,
we are two girls who have never
gone hungry, never counted their ribs,
never sucked in their tummies
the way they were taught.

We have never ran the length of the stairs
until we collapsed, never hid an empty
wrapper in the bottom of a garbage can.

We are children, we are fresh, returning
at the end of a summer night with twigs
braided into our scalps, mud settled in our ears.

We laugh at our mother’s horrified face,
laugh all the way to the bath, laugh so hard
a little bit of pee runs all the way down someone’s leg
and upon seeing it, laugh even more.

Jen Gayda Gupta lives, writes, and travels in a tiny camper with her husband and their dog. Her work has been published in One Art, Rattle, Sky Island Journal, The Shore, Wrongdoing and others. You can find her @jengaydagupta and jengaydagupta.com.