When We Met During Prohibition
you were a scofflaw and I swore up and down I was a teetotaler
but at the weekends stole nips of your contraband. On my birthday
you gave me a hip flask, a brilliant piece of armor for the dance floor.
My whole life: a toss up between Carry Nation and the flappers.
Life with Carry, dead before ‘12: to be good is to act wild. My first
taste of a reckless woman. Smash the saloons but don’t grab, destroy
what you despise instead of dwelling on what you might want. Later,
life with flappers: a hairstyle weighing less than ten pounds, rouge
and fake pearls, the discovery that our Victorian mothers were wrong
or lying or simply starved—orgasms weren’t myth at all.
Had been there for the taking. You wore suspenders and pomade
in your hair and at first I told myself Well, boys wear suspenders,
but then it became better for both of us that you weren’t a boy,
that I wasn’t a teetotaler, that my hair was chopped but femme.
That my first hero wasn’t afraid to dismantle a man’s milieu
with a hatchet, give up a marriage, sing praise without embarrassment.
Carry might be the reason for my little sips today. My torn stockings.
My theological cherry-picking. My hemline, a risen afterthought.
I’ll take her disgust as a compliment. I’ll take you home on the train.
| Kathleen Jones |
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levelheaded: When We Met During Prohibition
In the first line of this week’s poem, the wonderful, antiquated words scofflaw and teetotaler place us in the time of prohibition as the title promises. But, early on, it’s clear that this era serves mainly as a scaffold upon which the speaker can build and explore her personal development as well as her relationship with the poem’s “you.” By the poem’s end, the speaker’s growth proves to have much wider reaching implications for people today.
As the second stanza tells us, the speaker sees her life as “a toss up between Carry Nation and the flappers.” The influence of “you” has been to lead her more toward the flapper side, where women discovered that their “Victorian mothers were wrong / or lying or simply starved—orgasms weren’t myth at all.” As fun as the history lesson in the first half of the poem is, the piece takes a surprisingly intimate turn in the sixth stanza, paving the way for the emotional payoff in the poem’s final sentence.
The image of the poem’s you with “suspenders and pomade in [her] hair” is sexy. Upon thinking that that suspenders are for boys, the speaker’s realization that “it became better for both of us that you weren’t a boy” is even sexier, but it’s also incredibly tender and emotionally complex. Through this line, we reconsider the push and pull going on in the mind of our speaker—a woman who admires Carry Nation and her ability to “dismantle a man’s milieu / with a hatchet” but also likes to hit up the dance floor with a flask on her belt.
Just as Carry Nation—a six foot tall intimidator—broke societal norms, so does our speaker with her “torn stockings” and “theological cherry-picking.” Her risen hemline demonstrates that modern women are free to dress as they choose. More importantly, the idea that a fashion choice is a mere “afterthought” for our speaker suggests that women have bigger fish to fry. They’ve got people to love. The train’s moving forward. It’s headed home, to a place where we can be with somebody and also be ourselves.
– The Editors
