that what swells is not always a wound. she wakes,
hours later, to an orchestra of breath in the next room
and makes her way down the hall, hovers in the doorway,
and sees a dozen girls in white, quivering against the carpet.
for a moment, a small chaos blooms in her sternum,
cheeks erupt with blood, the dance of denial
in her stomach, and then she remembers her own
small ghosts—the curl of her best friend’s toes in a room
like this one, breath echoing from her pillow
back into her mouth again and again, like this,
until she grew tired and resolved herself into the floor.
NO BAPTISM
Once, everything was a gift. Once, anything
resembling the thing we wanted was the thing
we wanted. We were not yet gangly and scowling
at the generic cereal in the cabinet
or knock-off Adidas slides with four stripes.
When we begged for a swimming pool and my father
filled trash cans with hose water, we saw
what was made for our bodies and no one else’s;
when he built a playhouse from splintered
plywood, with a metal slide, we saw a giant
silver tongue spilling into the dirt.
When the sun lifted itself to its highest point,
a proud bully, and the city became a third-degree
burn, we ignored the desert curfew and instead
heard the slide singing, One more ride,
imagined ourselves floating without burns
to the ground. So I stood at the top, naked
under my dress, and let my legs unfold in front
of me, lace parachute ballooning from my hips,
bare butt to the metal, blisters hatching
like small eggs, rising, pink yolks,
I heard the drought laughing
with its smoker’s throat:
There’s no water for you here.
the pain I don’t say
out loud, builds a home
inside me.
FIRST GRADE, 1998
Dylan got busted for bringing a bullet to school & when he slipped the casing out of his pocket like a rare pill we were all certain that the hollow point would explode at any second, our bodies tense and heavy like a dozen dying suns, we imagined his hand blown to confetti but I knew he came from a family that shot big game, I knew they had a meat freezer & glass-eyed deer on every wall, so it wasn’t his fault he didn’t see bullets the way the rest of us did, something he could toss up and catch in his palm with ease & it was the same year my lips were so chapped that the red crack ran up beneath my nose & I couldn’t stop licking the wound & when I left class to hold my burning mouth against the water fountain, Frankie was passed out & bleeding from his forehead on the hallway floor & Ms. Rosemary said I might have saved his life, whether that’s true, I don’t know, what I do know is that Frankie was a redheaded soundless child & after that he wouldn’t stop talking about almost dying but never gave me credit for discovering his body & the next week Jeremy launched himself off a swing set & his forearm bone shot through his bent wrist, I saw it, anyway, I heard the word fractured in a spelling bee so when I ran to tell Ms. Amy, I was set on flaunting my new vocabulary but the hard corners jutted into my cheeks & my memory went soft & so I just stood there stuttering about the skeleton & finally, when Ms. Amy found Jeremy in the grass, the word wriggled its way into my mouth & I shouted, It’s fractured! & Ms. Amy whipped & snapped, It’s so much more than that, but I was just happy to have spoken my new language & then there was the family of baby pink mice in the reading corner & Carl, my favorite custodian, had to remove them, but rumor has it that he gathered them in a sock & smashed them under a rock in the parking lot & I couldn’t look at him the same after that, based on my understanding he was a murderer of tiny things & we were tiny things, I remember, even then, understanding the smallness of myself, of all of us & the way we had to dodge & skip through the world like rodents under the boots of men, except for once, when Miguel went on vacation to Mexico & was killed in a collapsed cave & we planted him a tree but it was just a seedling, no taller than my right knee & when we all stood in a circle to wish him goodbye, I remember looking at the struggling plant, its wiry arms & frail trunk & feeling, for the first time, big.
[my favorite pastime is watching the babysitter put her hair into a ponytail. she smooths it flat against her scalp & even when i think it must be perfect she smooths it again, gathers the overflow in her fist and removes a black elastic from her wrist, stretches and slaps till there’s no slack, splits the tail in two & yanks the arms apart, forehead skin strained taut against her skull, eyebrows pulled to an arch like a doll drawn happy.]
THE FIRST SHAVE
I am nine.
We are bored
and Karen is dying.
We drove to Austin
that summer
so Sarah’s dad—
who described Karen as
the great and impossible love
of his life, who taught us
the word lymphoma and then
the concept of the prefix,
how it explains where the tumor lives—
could say goodbye.
The house is a rind
spooned out by the onset of death,
what’s left is a medicine cabinet
full of razors & we are hungry
& alone & sitting
on the living room floor
where the light
from a naked window
slices the hardwood
like melon, exposes
each individual fuzz
on my scabbed calf,
a field of erect, yellow poppies
& we have been alive as girls
long enough to know
to scowl at this reveal
& what better time
than now to practice removal.
Once, I watched my mother
skin a potato in six
perfect strokes.
I remember this
as Sarah teaches me
to prop up my leg
on the side of the tub
and runs the blade
along my thigh. See?
she says. Isn’t that so much better?
Before we left Albuquerque
her father warned us,
She will have no hair,
a trait
we have just
begun to admire
except, of course,
for the hair he is talking about,
that which we hold against our necks,
that which will get us
husbands or compliments
or scouted in a mall,
eventually cut off
by our envious sisters
while we sleep.
ALL OF THE BEAUTIFUL ONES WERE CATHOLIC
tight buns at the napes of their necks
hair combed slick behind their ears
& middle parts so straight they might
have been split with a razor by their mothers
that morning. they didn’t wear jewelry except
for purity rings & golden rosaries, thin chains
crawling over the humps of their clavicles.
there was no word for godless then
so i lied, said i too had a first communion
wore a buttercream dress & all the photos
were in storage, memorized the prayers
i needed &
said them as bored as i could,
played apathetic towards my new king.
jenna believed me until she came over
& quietly scanned the walls of my parents’ house,
which were empty mostly except for a few
paintings of fish & men carrying fruit.
finally, upstairs, she whispered that she knew
i wasn’t a girl of the lord, that she wouldn’t tell
anyone as long as i told her what i was.
i am nothing, i said, prouder than i meant it.
she was forgiving & offered to take me to church
so that i could learn how to receive the bread,
wish peace, all of the holy dances
i had never practiced. we rehearsed there,
played church in my bedroom
& she was the priest, taught me how to cup
my hands, how to place it on my tongue.
finally, i got it down pat, enough to make
it look like muscle memory & jenna seemed
regretful, then made me promise to make myself
believe in it or we’d both be sent to hell.
ADDENDUM TO NO BAPTISM
When I tell the story of the slide
at parties, or poetry readings
or wherever I might indulge
in the business of handing over a tale
as perfect as a clean and burped infant,
I leave out the ending.
Know your audience
is something I hear people say.
And so I don’t say the part
where a man saw a child’s
burning body and announced
his hand a healer.
And so, I end the story in my scream,
not in my silence, facedown
on a card table in the backyard
while the next-door neighbor
hovered his splayed fingers
above my newborn wound,
how he promised if I focused
hard enough, closed my eyes,
listened to my breath, I would
feel something. Energy, he called it.
No need for a doctor, he said,
and somehow I knew, the sooner I said
it worked, the sooner he would
stop floating above me.
So I swallowed each welt,
said, All better, and climbed
from atop the table,
pulled my dress back over
my knees and did my best to walk
with no limp, inside.
[i dream of knowing the babysitter in her other life. the one where she doesn’t apologize for cursing & shows me where she hides whatever she hides. she gave me a jacket & in it, i found an eighth-grade school schedule, folded & soft from the washer, in the pocket. i kept it in my desk drawer, studied it at night, ran my finger over the class abbreviations, ENG 009, HIS 009, MAT 010, calculated the time gap between each class—seven minutes, how do you get from one end of the building to the other in seven minutes? i coiled & split from the anxiety, grieved for the safety of a single classroom, a teacher who goes by their first name—wanted to ask her so bad how she did it, how she made it out alive, but i didn’t want to give myself away, instead i watch her walk around her bedroom & take notes on the way she moves—precise, everything has a correct place, seems like she’s always cleaning, always putting something away—she’s fast & i wonder how she became that. maybe she always has been, maybe she never had to learn how.]
ADDENDUM II TO NO BAPTISM
I should also mention that I don’t know
if his hands ever touched me, though they did.
This distorted fact might also be a reason
I leave out the ending. Another rule
to good storytelling is that no one wants
a half-remembered tragedy. You must
know the width of the knife and how
it ruined you, name the organs it kissed.
Maybe he touched me, maybe again,
maybe that is why for years I wrapped my mouth
around anything that would fill it
is not beautiful. It is a bouquet
of the bitter and half-bloomed.
Sometimes, the writer in me
wants to remember just so I can give
you a story. Sometimes, I think
the memory will appear in my doorway,
first a shadow, then a man, stepping
into the light.
memory, too,
lives in my body
not my brain.
GAMBLE
some girls were seasoned in sex,
visibly bored when the conversation
lingered around foreplay but never
nosedived beyond it. some girls
had done it, but with their boyfriends
who were still boys & still loved them,
which made it not count.
it didn’t matter if you were a virgin
or not, it mattered how you used it,
like currency, a sack of nickels
on the bar top. it was before any of us
believed we were good at anything,
so we became good at our bodies,
at talking about them like we were
greyhound bitches, lean & itching
to break through the race gates.
before either of us had sex,
jordan & i showed up to the skate park
in plaid skirts with no panties
& the boys took turns sticking
their faces underneath, like small
children lining up behind a telescope,
giddy for a suddenly reachable universe.
jordan brought a disposable camera
& the boys snapped photos
of their skirt-submerged
heads, us with our hands
over our mouths like amateur
marilyns, knock-kneed & flustered.
who knows what we got from it,
maybe a loosie or a ride or the chance
to finish a sentence & then took
the camera to the pharmacy on 4th street,
where the middle-aged woman
printed each glossy still & we paid
in quarters & she didn’t ask any questions
& we hovered over them, our chests hot and skittish,
laying the best ones out like tarot cards promising
a good future. but soon we grew bored of our own faces,
grew out of our old bodies & threw the photos away
where my father found them later that week
& left them on the kitchen table for me to find.
they looked foreign against my mother’s tablecloth,
a girl not welcome in this house.
he pondered over them like a poker deck,
selected one of me & a headless boy,
let it dangle between his thumb & forefinger,
waited a moment for me to drink it in,
to look myself in the eye,
& said, who are you?
MY MOTHER SAYS I WASN’T A BAD GIRL, I WAS JUST BORED
after Kim Addonizio
i wasn’t the real thing, the bad girl by instinct
who wouldn’t even call herself bad because
that would mean at one point she considered what
it might look like to be good. i was something
less lovable—woke up before the bad girl sleeping
next to me & tinkered wit
h her makeup till noon,
followed her out the window so i could mimic
the way she bent her legs, monkey-fucked every
cigarette so i didn’t get caught fumbling with
the flint wheel on some dude’s bic. i swung the bat
in the right direction, undid enough belts
to fill a résumé right, but i never hailed the ride
on my own, never instigated the fight, never promised
a man i was good & meant it. the bad girl calls
her body what it is—the shit—i called my body
unfamiliar until it was looked at & then channeled
everything i’d learned from the bad girl,
how to arch the back, curl the toes, don’t be ashamed
of the veins in your neck, she said once, they mean
you’re feeling something. the bad girl wants everyone
around her to feel something & she wants to see proof.
once, we smoked pcp from a dr pepper can
& lay in the dark, talking about our stomachs.
she was frustrated that she couldn’t see anything,
so she had me hold a lighter above my torso
while she pulled up my shirt & watched as my belly
rose & fell, each time i breathed her in.
WITH HER
We wasted whole days on the 66 bus,
cruising Lomas for thirty-five cents
just to remind ourselves, and whoever else
decided to look, that we were capable of transience.
But mostly, it was for the air-conditioning.
Jordan wore long sleeves that summer
and told the seventh-grade counselor
that she had fallen into a bucket of knives,
which, I remember thinking, was not untrue,
based on the use of the verb fall in other phrases,
to imply it was not particularly accidental
but more so situational, like how one might
fall in love or fall in with a group of bad girls.
The bus wagged and groaned from my house
to the park in about thirty minutes, at which point
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