SUMMER 

 

Summer of failed hairlessness
of clogged follicles inflamed 

​

In the afternoons I ride the bus
thighs newly bare & sticky against the seats 

​

Though I am not allowed, I wear shorts
I am left for hours alone

​

Light of the computer 
blue in my oil-slick face

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Summer of danger
Summer of want

​

My body swells in shapes 
I do not understand 

​

I am hungry for touch 
& ashamed to be looked at

​

In the silence I know 
something is coming

​

The blood comes & comes
clasps itself to denim, to sheets

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The afternoons are still with heat
humid as a strange man’s breath

​

& when it happened
I watched flies coating old fruit

​

Metallic layer of bodies, 
their frenzied feeding 

​

The long afternoon of my life, 
long life, long season of rot

 

​

​

ELEGY

 

see her: little cousin, little sister, sparrow-boned, alive.

 

i want to turn to firewood everything that hurts her.

 

i do not have the verbs for what i need for her.

 

i needed them myself & was not protected.

 

i want to make ash of this world that did not protect us

 

& from that nourished soil sprout one better.

 

at the kitchen table we eat a glutinous stew

 

with our soft hands, submerged to the second knuckle

 

& she is telling me a story & she is telling it quickly

 

short chirp of her laugh as she tries to mold from it the joke,

 

the old story of our girlhoods; the ways we haunt

 

the houses built to keep the world out, to keep us safe;

 

the ways we still were hurt; the ways we could not tell anyone

 

what was done to us; the ways we swallowed blame, smooth pebble

 

in the shut mouth; the ways we could not tell our mothers

 

when we needed them the most. i see her & i am fourteen,

 

i am twenty-two, i have been badly hurt. i see her, little mouth,

 

bare-faced & vulnerable. i see her & don’t know where to begin.