Weirdly this poem came from this prompt from WRITE IT:
Poet Dorianne Laux compared falling in love with accidentally being doused with gasoline while working at a gas station: Light-headed, scrubbed raw, I felt / pure and amazined--the way the amber gas glazed my flesh, the searing / subterranean pain of it, ho wmy skin / shimmered and ached, glowed / like rainbowed oil on the pavement. Try, if you can, to compare the experience of falling in love with something complete unromantic, even ugly or dangerous.
We walked across the train tracks at the end of the dead-end road on our way to the Pumphouse, a bar we all went to. The dance floor was lighted and, reliably, three young women could inspire a bartender to buy drinks—sloe gin fizzes, Tequila sunrises—whatever we were drinking that we could nurse for hours with only coins in our pockets. We were celebrating my new job at a famous deli named for its founder—Max's or Maurice's—and known for specialties like bear claw, pastrami and German potato salad.
The railroad ties split in the summer sun, the signal arm silent in the gathering gloom of a dusk that promised the Hustle and Electric Slide. I stopped to dig out a stone from the heel of my sandal. My friends waited for me on the other side of a barricade where a weed-plagued sidewalk led to Grand Avenue. A conflagration erupted across the street. We flinched at the screech of an overheating metal roof, our faces a campfire of flickering flame and shadow, glowing barrettes and make-up shimmer. The deli was on fire. A mill of pedestrians and firefighters turned away as windows exploded, glass shattering in a shower of shards. The air sizzled with smoke and fat and sugar, a skirmish of smells I still associate with catastrophe.
Endings especially got up my nose with a hair-stirring oversensitivity. The three of us wouldn't remain friends after college. I wasn't prepared for the disappointment at the potluck of their decisions. Or was it me? Smoldering with the worse kind of luck, left to walk home alone, stuck in the gesture of removing a pebble from the softness underfoot?