College Boyfriends
“If I had known, would I have still made
mistake
after mistake?” —Ada Limon, “After Nostalgia”
We were certain they’d marry us. So said the
Magic 8-Ball
we picked up at Spencer’s shopping for edible
body
paint and
Cherry-Coke condoms. So said Rock Island’s
Happy Hour psychic.
Even our girlfriends agreed as they held
back our hair while
we puked. When our boyfriends cheated,
we said we were
nobody’s fool. We’d swear them off. Play Alanis
on loop. But come
closing time, we’d call from a bar in El Paso,
from Drink &
Drown in Juarez, a house party on Los Alamos
because we knew,
we’d bet our life, they’d always pick
a drunk girl up.
Mini-skirts and fuck-me boots, we’d stumble
into his car, play
“Crazy for You”—#6 in the queue. We knew
the moves, how to
offer ourselves up. Unbuttoned, unbuckled
we’d squeeze
between them and the wheel. Sexy
as Alicia
Silverstone on MTV. We thought they wanted us
wild. Girls who’d
go down on them in a theater, in a bathroom stall,
at three a.m.
careening 90 miles an hour under a cloud-sutured
sky. We’d let them
do anything they wanted. Let them in our beds
after they left the
bar with some other girl. Let them leave
the condom off, let
them put their hands where we didn’t want
them. Let them and
let them, their lips sugared with Cuervo
as they carved us
through bruised mountains, break-neck speed.
And we could have
been undone, disintegrated into dust, what
with the
sandstorms, what with the tumbleweeds and tequila.
But what did we
care for caution? What did we care for the world?
We cared only for
the salt-slick turn of their throat, the river-bed grit
of our thirst. It
all seemed so urgent: how to get them to want us.
We thought our
hearts were doors
in need of
breaking.
When they called us
beautiful
what did we know but to hand them the axe?
what did they know but to honey the blade?
Driving Home the Morning After We Both Said Things
Both of us hung
over with the sloppy revelry
of confession, both
nursing the bitter tonic of regret
& though we
aren’t quite lost, there’s no exit in sight.
I suppose this is
what they call depression:
landscape in every
direction crying its wares,
catalogue of
despair. Such lovely, lonely clutter.
Trailer parks
deflating like balloons. Porches tilting
like dinner plates
scraped into trash. Fences so rotted
they’re good only
for corralling hope. An occasional silo
punctures the
terrain like a thumbtack holding a history in place.
We pass a woman
hanging sheets. I watch her pause, petal
her face to the
sun, sheets billowing like wings. I want to tell you
I think she’s found
a way to float into the sky, but your eyes
are on the road
ahead and she has already turned back to her work
which is what our
therapist has said marriage is. Hard
work. Your lips a
clothesline taut where last night’s
words still hang.
New griefs gathering
in my tongue’s
basket.
Talk to each other, our therapist
advised.
Have at it.
And haven’t we been
at it?
And are we finished
with it yet?
Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose (she/her) is the author of two chapbooks, Wild Things (Main Street Rag, 2021) and Imago, Dei (winner, Rattle Chapbook Poetry Prize, 2022). Her poetry and prose appear in The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, Room, Descant, Women Studies Quarterly, and Clockhouse, among others. She is the recipient of Descant’s 2025 Betsy Colquitt Poetry Prize, among other awards. Elizabeth lives in Rochester, NY, where she coordinates the Creative Writing Program at Monroe Community College. Find Elizabeth at www.elizabethjohnstonambrose.com and on Bluesky@poetlady74
