Practicing 11/9

"Practicing" by Marie Howe

Marie Howe was born in Rochester, New York, in 1950. She attended Sacred Heart Covenant School and the University of Windsor. She earned and MFA from Columbia University. Howe's works include The Good Thief  (1988), What the Living Do (1997), and The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008). Howe was the Poet Laureate of New York State from 2012-2014.

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,

a song for what we did on the floor in the basement

of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:

That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s mouths

how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and

one was the boy, and we paired off—maybe six or eight girls—and turned out

the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our

nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy:

concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry.

Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes

instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun,

plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats.

We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs

outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was

practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost

in someone’s hair . . . and we grew up and hardly mentioned who

the first kiss really was—a girl like us, still sticky with moisturizer we’d

shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song

for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire,

just before we’d made ourselves stop.

“Practicing” is a nostalgic poem from the point of view of a woman reminiscing on early memories of her first sexual encounters. The poem is a very open description of what the narrator and her friends did when they had sleepovers at each other’s houses when they were young.  The girls would kiss one another and call it “practicing” for when they kissed boys. The speaker is looking back and reflecting on these past experiences and it is clear that she sees these actions differently now. While recounting what her and her friends engaged in, Howe adds in quick comments that shows how her perspective has changed over the years. Her open and reflective tone shows how she has developed a new perspective over the years of what “practicing” meant; it was actually the girls’ exploration of their sexual curiosity. However, towards the end of the poem, a new side of this story surfaces when Howe adds that they “never spoke of it upstairs outdoors, in daylight, not once.” They kept their actions a secret for fear of what other people would think. Howe’s last line also packs a punch when it says, “I want to write a song for…the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire, just before we made ourselves stop.” The girls were so young that they really didn’t know what and why they were engaging in these activities so they called it “practicing.” They were also terrified, because they didn’t know what they were doing, how other people would react if they found out. Therefore they felt oppressed and kept it a secret. The way Howe inserts her thoughts as a grown woman about this time in her life all while keeping the nostalgia of the poem helps invite the reader to feel as if they are experiencing this all first-hand right with her.