Olympia by Robin Crane
The crooked holding back of her smile,
A simultaneous desire for glory and
Annihilation.
We, me and her, were always doing something
Self-defeating,
As though we couldn’t help it,
telepathically whispering “hey, watch this,”
and pouring a pan of grease all over
a long worked-on party ensemble.
We did it because it was funny
To each other,
We did it because we were both ruined anyway,
Two white middle class girls –
Who on t.v. would understand why this ruined us?
Because it’s the shape and smell of mediocrity
And just enough safety to prevent
Full-fledged deaths.
But what about bruised ribs
And broken teeth?
Always doing things the wrong way,
Half on purpose,
Wanting a type of Woody Guthrie life,
To be a wanderer, to have interesting stories
And no more petty cares,
But instead just winding up the girl in the song,
the girl who loses her good looks
In “Like a Rollingstone” –
we’re invisible now,
we got no secrets to conceal.
Why do anything?
For glory,
In spite of ourselves.
For lives that’ll be hard but magic.
Robin Crane: I am a twenty nine year old fiction writer and poet, born in Los Angeles, currently living in Philadelphia, on a street sometimes occupied with horses; it never ceases to surprise me. Works of mine have been published in Olympia Literary Yarn, Newtopia, Poetry Superhighway, All Things Girl (”Dating Show,” published a few issues back) and the anthology ‘Zine Scene.
