It’s Springtime, Elise, and You’re Missing All of It Rebecca Hazelton Not the expected robin, or the ragged deer stepping from the woods to lip the new green— but rather the girls in bikinis who stand in Tallahassee traffic, lifting Car Wash signs, their pert behinds a greater glory than pollen count, or even gravity. Boxing ring girls, sans spangles, they leg in heels from corner to corner, the culmination of suffragettes and Betty Friedan, their every step a violin’s reel in the orchestra of the sunny day, a glare that makes me lower my shades against it all. You’d say it was a word like heartbreaking— how in the coffee shop the young man’s shirt is open just enough to see a flash of curling hair— Either that or tasty— Let me put it another way— even though you’re not sitting here, the bored policeman directs traffic, the strolling dogs sniff from ass to ass, the telephones still ring. Rebecca Hazelton is currently the Jay C. and Ruth Hall Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Creative Writing Institute. She attended the University of Notre Dame for her MFA in poetry and recently completed her PhD at Florida State University. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Field, and Pleiades, among others. “It’s Springtime, Elise, and You’re Missing All of It” appears in our Summer 2011 issue.