what do you bring to a rock festival?
sleeping bag? check.
cans of soup? check.
box of matches? check.
watermelon as canteen?
my arms too full to check.
walk through rock fest gates,
skinny legs wrapped in fatigues,
tank-topped, flat-bellied,
still a virgin, but pregnant
with desire
for rock-and-roll.
watermelon as chair holds me
as I await Amboy Dukes and Ravi Shankar
with 60,000 others in Stevens Point,
10,000 more than Monterey Pop
but only a tenth the supreme get-together
attracted the year before at Woodstock.
two rocks, round as squashes
straddle kindling and dried weeds,
which I light, set atop with open can of soup
balanced like a dancer
on stone feet,
bon appetit!
I sleep with watermelon under my knees
so no one will steal it,
meanwhile, strolling hippie dudes
choose 2 am to storm the pup tent,
not for watermelon,
but its payload of four lasses, sleeping shoulder to shoulder.
I use watermelon as weapon,
roll melon and me forward,
kick one dude in the jaw
with my foot,
while a fellow sleep-interrupted pal
knees another through canvas curtain.
the sorrowful straggled
keep a 20-foot distance
the rest of the weekend,
shaking their heads.
One calls from afar,
“where the heck do girls like you come from, anyway?”
I hold the watermelon
over my head with two hands.
“we grow the likes of us in pods like this, man,”
I say, hurl the watermelon
on the ground in front of me,
splitting it into four pieces
dudes jump back
farther still,
my tent mates kneel,
dip and dine
on cool sweetness,
red liquid dripping down our faces.
About the author:
Cynthia Gallaher is a Chicago USA-based author of four poetry collections, three chapbooks, and an award-winning nonfiction/memoir/creativity guide. Her hybrid memoir “Match Heads: My Conversations with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber” will be published 2027 by Southern Illinois University Press.
Photo by César Couto on Unsplash