Born Again Claire

I put on the sequin skin we save to wear when we are together.
How we look the same in it, skip to the same ragtag melody
carried since we were babies. I know we didn’t learn Bad Girls

from our mothers. And the world grew up around us raised by
the same God-fearing folk. We feared God too, but not so much

we stopped playing. We played in church. She folded paper dresses
out of Kleenex sitting in the pews. I held them in my lap holier

than communion. I still look for her paper dresses before we go out.
Now the pattern reminds me of her freckles, the fabric flecked and
curling like her chestnut hair that signaled to me once

              like a glow stick from the doorway of pre-K.

At recess in floral cotton leggings and oversized sweaters, we cocooned
into that yellow tunnel to hide from Georgina who pulled my hair.

              We started to make the most perfect patterns.

Before feet grew, we shared pink pointy toe shoes, A-cups in the locker room,
first periods we called purses, and wedding seasons six months apart,
orbiting like moons over our reflections on the lake she grew up on.

We both reemerged from the death of my pregnancy and her marriage in
ritual mourning, ready to dance, pulling out some costume we never planned,

her crochet halter, my silk tube top, both burnt orange, with gold-rimmed glasses.
We wore our hurt in our shoes and put the weight of our bodies against it

sweating out until our feet hurt worse than our chest, camouflaged
as each other on the dance floor fog making our way back
to the tunnel we know to hide in together when our hair is pulled.

Coco Seney is a poet based in Houston, with roots in Kansas City and Chicago. She is completing her debut chapbook, Going Back for the Girls, shaped through the CharlotteLit Chapbook Lab in mentorship with poet Nickole Brown. Her work centers women’s interior worlds—what is shared in bar bathrooms, carried in bodies, and learned over time. Her poems ask how human pastness might be sacred, preserving memory through the retracing of girlhood, millennial culture, and ghost lives. Seney works in innovation and entrepreneurship, holds a BA from Rice University and an MBA from the University of Virginia. Find her @ReadCoco.