Summers, About 1959

Summers, About 1959
by alberto rios
Women wore those sleeveless blouses
Where, if you tried, you could peek in
And try to get a look.
But it was always the wrong angle.
Contact lenses got invented in those years, too.
I remember the first boy who got some:
He had big white lines
From his nose to his ears
As if he were wearing invisible glasses.
That’s how someone explained them to me
And I believed it: invisible glasses.
But they were really just the tan lines
From so many years of big, standard-issue
Black frames, glasses a little like
Plymouths for the face.
This was when summers were all the X-15,
Mickey Mantle and Roberto Clemente,
TV dinners and the drive-in.
Summers had a smell then. When you inhaled
You got the sound of crickets and cicadas
As well in your nose, and Sputnik too-
A word that rolled around in our mouths
Then spat itself out. Sputnik. We said it
All the time. Things were changing.