Throwback Night, Midway Skating Rink

Brittany Rogers

I ignore the kids’ slinky arms. The dishes. They daddy. Tonight
I rush to the rink with my best friend, her fingers locked into mine.

The sun dipped already, but we sweating, edges ribboned under
summer’s breath. I forget to take pictures, but trust. We fine.

Out after dark, awestruck at our own grown. Downtown
ain’t looked like ours since they landed on Woodward and mined,

hollowed the center to erect a highrise. Joke’s on them.
Everybody here Black and in love and my,

don’t we know how to reclaim what’s ours. We on beat with it.
Look how our thighs obey: backwards, glide, turn, slow whine.

The DJ cuts to Cupid Shuffle, and even on skates, we hustle. Our necks,
tilted bottles, laughter splashing and messy. Oh, how I mined

for this belonging, scythe swinging, searching for my name. So busy
hiding from selfish, I had dropped damn near everything that was mine.

What Keeps Us

Poems to Read in Community

Inspired by C. D. Wright’s poem “What Keeps,” we offer Brittany Rogers‘s “Throwback Night, Midway Skating Rink” as part of a twenty-poem selection from poems we’ve featured in 2024—poems, like bread, that one might pass across the table—to a loved one, or to oneself. 

Read editor Lloyd Wallace’s introduction to the collection and statements from our staff readers hereRead poems by selecting below.

What Keeps

Some nights We stay up
passing it back and
forth
between us
drinking deep

Read >

This Era

Forests and cities

along the way sleep like huge dark churches.

Read >

Talisman

each of us bearing the art
in a curve of wing, a small motif
of feather,

Read >

Rewind

Have you ever seen something that buzzes inside you?
I am watching two kids encounter each other

Read >

Rationale

Because she still won’t sleep alone, you sleep deeply
with her small warm body wrapped in your arms.

Read >

Pupusas

no, the pupusa is a portrait
            of this life, crusting & breaking
                        with every lick & tooth

Read >

Psalm III

in what language should I speak to you, sun
so you’ll rise tomorrow for my child, so you’ll
rise and stimulate the growth of our food,

Read >

Night Song

You’ll never know
what became of me
in the dark, how
my body opened,

Read >

Handfuls

Summer is a pure lone mountain.
Somehow, a winter flowers against an enormous blue loneliness

Read >

Eurydice

It snowed the day I died, a freak spring storm.
(It was in the papers.)

Read >

December

Instead of snow, a dark pouring rain
to dodge as passersby reject us.  No spruces, but sycamores with their white cankers.

Read >

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Headshot of Brittany Rogers

Brittany Rogers is a poet, educator, and life-long Detroiter. She has work published or forthcoming in Indiana Review, Four Way Review, Underbelly, Mississippi Review, Lambda Literary, and Oprah Daily. Brittany is a fellow of VONA, The Watering Hole, Poetry Incubator, and Pink Door Writing Retreat. She is Editor-in-Chief of Muzzle Magazine and co-host of VS Podcast. Her debut collection Good Dress is forthcoming from Tin House Press (October 2024). Learn more about Brittany at www.brittanyrogers.org.

Cover of Prairie Schooner Summer 2023

Volume 9 No. 2

Lincoln, Nebraska

University of Nebraska

Editor-in-Chief
Kwame Dawes

Managing Editor 
Ashley Strosnider

Our mission remains what it has been for more than five decades. In the words of founding editor Carolyn Kizer, “We shall continue to encourage the young and the inexperienced, the neglected mature, and the rough major talents and the fragile minor ones.” We remain as committed as we were in 1959 to publishing the best poetry we can find, and to expanding the role and scope of poetry in ways both public and private, innovative and traditional, as an art and as a clear and necessary dialogue in a world overrun with noise.

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