A Certain Hunger

by Chelsea G. Summers

fecundity will always turn to decay.

You kill, anyway, and then you see what you can take with you.

In America, our girlfriends teach us what love, trust, and desire are; they hold our hands as we navigate the Scylla of sex and the Charybdis of culture.

With them we are our truest, most essential selves. We don’t have to be pretty, but we heap praise upon one another when we are. We don’t have to be nice, and we forgive each other when we aren’t. With our friends, our guard tumbles like acrobats, falls like leaves, and swirls in glittery, dusty eddies.

Girlhood friendship

Our unshakeable belief in women’s essential goodness is a wondrous, drooling thing.