The One Girl at the Boys' Party

First of all, this is the most sexual poem I have ever read in my life. Granted I am no Robert Frost, I can catch a sexual innuendo when i see one. There are many sexually descriptive words used in the poem that are just down right dirty. The boys "tower and bristle" and the girl is "smooth and sleek." the boys "strip to their suits" and her body is "hard." just to name a few. Finally the last few lines seem to be describing some orgasmic scene. Hardly appropriate for a little girl that is wearing a swimsuit with "hamburgers and french fries" printed on it. I don't know about you guys, but i'm picturing the girl from little miss sunshine. I know you're probably thinking wow Bryan is such a pervert but i swear i don't go scanning these poems to find this stuff. It just springs out at me... that was a poor choice of words. So this is a bit of a sensitive subject, a young girl starting to become a woman. I'm not sure that Sharon Olds did this subject a lot of justice, portraying in such a perverse way, especially in the time period that this was published, the 1940s. As my father always tells me, "they never used to put that kind of stuff on television!" everyone time we see a maxi-pad commercial. Ah, the good ole days when we didn't talk about this stuff. So kind of a touchy subject in a time period where this stuff wasn't talked about. It must have been pretty controversial.