Natalie Solmer
I Am a Great Lake
My youth was Everclear spilling
slicking the table, its
decks of cards, the phones that didn’t
exist in our pockets or hands
but Euchre. We learned it in school
playing in our plaid skirt uniforms.
My friend licked the liquor up.
All of us licked the liquor up
until I had to stop. Until alcohol
became old as me.
I am as old as the rusted out mini-van
we drove around in, blasting The Score.
I am old as the bats
that swarmed the summer evenings
around the baseball stadium lights, the empty
factory’s brick façade behind them.
I am Studebaker’s brick façade, old
as a summer evening
Smirnov in a 7-11 Slurpee,
my sandal thrown out the van’s window
as we drove to the forbidden beach
up the highway to the Great Lake.
I am a Great Lake, so
old, girlfriends singing
no one knowing our location
as old as midnight
as sneaking in my mother’s door
just in time
old enough now to become
my mother’s door.
Originally published in MER vol. 22
Natalie Solmer was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana, and now lives in Indianapolis, where she is
a professor of English at Ivy Tech Community College. She is also the founder and editor in chief of The Indianapolis Review. Her poetry has appeared in Rustbelt publishing’s Indianapolis Anthology, The Little Eagle Creek Anthology, and in journals such as Ecotheo Review, Notre Dame Review, Colorado Review, The Literary Review, Pleiades, and Puerto Del Sol.