In Response to Davka

Davka writes memoirspiel, like the stories in Without a Net. Today, I read this. She's class angry, Davka. I want to feel removed from that anger, but I can't, obviously. But I'm starting to understand that it's rage, and it's not about me. She doesn't even know me. I started thinking in poem when I read that post.

i push country into my voice
so the boys will trust me
to go up on the ladder, clear the gutter
from the youth exhibit barn

i always win the non-dairy-farm-kid division
of the cow milking contest -
half a cup in a minute, last year

talkin country feels like rolling
down a rocky hillside, feeling for
jolts and bumps and raw patches

feels good when i get up,
knowing i've got enough rough in me
to talk through a day, at least

i don't want to be the summer kid they leer about,
don't want to be like olivia and francesca from florida
who come work the fair

they sit in the ticket booth.
i direct parking in summer lightning storms,
reflective orange jacket, pointing pickups

to invisible parking spaces in the mud.
i'm always the first to volunteer
for something that seems hard.

kayleigh, who i call barbie, got demerits for
improper hygiene again.
seems her triangle bikini top

wasn't enough to keep the bertsche boys
from getting distracted.
she lay like a cat stretched over lawn chairs

and asked me somethin she'd been meanin to -
her choir teacher said she had a good voice for musicals,
and did i know any musicals? or what the fuck a musical is?

barbie's got a car this year,
her daddy died in a snowmobile wreck
in january. she was daddy's girl,

he left her the car
and a house she lives in now with her boy.
she misses her sisters,

but they live with That Bitch.
can't do much about that for now,
till they're -

hang on, it's the boy.
barbie's not seventeen yet
and i don't want to tell her what a musical is.

i don't want to tell her i've never had a cavity,
or that i'm nervous about applying for colleges,
and i've never known somebody who's dad died

in a snowmobile accident
or in jail
or falling drunk off a bridge and cracking his skull when he broke through the ice

(I had no idea what to say about Mr. Talroco either)
and no one's asked me yet,
but I saw some of the littler ones looking at me,

absently rubbing their hands over the places
on their heads you could imagine horns growing.
i wonder if i should just get it over with.

my sister says i shouldn't push country into my voice
like that. it's disrespectful, and fake.
my sister wears tank tops in the heat,

tosses her long, tossable hair over a shoulder,
smiles big at everyone, and never promises anything.
the boys at the smokehouse offer to take her to movies

and give her free cajun jerky, her favorite kind.
she flirts with everyone with a kind of charm
i get to envy from the sidelines.

but when the thunder cracks,
i run with the boys to haul the art projects
into the dairy barn,

and then head for the parking lot to help haul
pickups out before they get stuck in the mud.
and this is what i've got. this is what i can do.

and the queen's english won't get a chevy out of a swamp,
no matter what your class.
and the boys, they sometimes grapclap my shoulder, give it a shake

and tell me i done good.
sometimes they talk like they forget im a summer rich girl,
and i grin, ready to throw myself down the rocks for just a little more rough.