In Twofold: a love poem

Tommie Christopher Brown is the girl with a full boy name. Currently living in a small town in Southern California, Tommie is a writer whose style spreads from poetic to academic, but finds home somewhere marrying the two. She has a BA in English studies with a focus in Philosophy and has recently written and worked for VICELAND, WORD Agency, and Mitu. Read more of her work here.

In Twofold. 

Double dutch girls, jumping through two ropes.

We never did learn how to handle things one at a time.

Your push against my pull, my steps match your steps.

You always have had a way of knowing when to jump in.

Two broken hearts that make one,

The chains wrapped around our necks remind us 

That when something is missing

 It doesn’t always mean that something is missing.

Come here, let’s fold these prison letters into origami swans.

Better yet, fortune tellers.

What’s your favorite color?

What’s your favorite number?

How many men have let us down?

One, two, three, four square never was our spot.

We learned early on that there was no such thing

As being on top if it meant I couldn’t take you with me. 

Double dutch girls, 

We never did learn how to be apart.

Chinese finger traps, we knew how to separate,

But the fun only happens when our hands are locked together.

This love is a secret handshake. 

Put out on display, but no one can follow how it goes. 

Each new step, a layer of life we lived in hushed tones

With flash lights in the backyard searching for who we were meant to be. 

We show it off with no fear of imitation, 

this love is not something that can be taught.

Come here, give me a boost so I can climb up this lemon tree,

I’ll pull you up once I get there. 

Use these branches as balancing acts, tight rope walkers. 

Round and round the cocktail rings of our history.

We learned how to stand by making lemonade, so let’s go.

25 cents a cup, no, make it 50. 

My dad’s drenched in Scotch, Hop up the price. 

75 cents your mom’s drowning in denial. 

Your brother gave up hope, one dollar.

 My mom said she didn’t work this hard for us to repeat history, two dollars. 

We need to buy plane tickets out of here to see what we can become. 

Break your piggy bank, 

Count the pieces of your life you are left with. 

Gather them up with mine;

We will make a mosaic of all the things we shattered. 

Hold it up to the light, 

A kaleidoscope of mistakes we made mimicking the mistakes they made. 

Reflecting off of one another, they won’t say my name without yours.

Alone we are fragments,

But together, we are one ever changing rhythm.

Double Dutch girls,

Two forces moving too fast in two different directions

Yet it’s one direction, our force field of steady stepping

If you trip, I trip, dont trip. We won’t trip, 

Because we never did learn how to skip a beat.