On the Other Side of the Yankee Girl Drawl
The camera is slow.
The screen.
A girl walks out of the shower.
She steps carefully into the shallow,
and wraps herself in an exhausted towel.
Her hands probe at the damp cushion of fat
belonging to her stomach.
She moves the towel onto her thighs
and soon her ankles,
hastily like a failed meditation.
Looks in the mirror and gives the fleshy outline
of her torso
a soft pinch, like teasing a toddler’s cheeks.
On the girl’s chest is what she regards,
the opposite of a bruise,
a ring of blemish
with redness that surfaces from an internal heat.
This is the type of hurt with an energy.
We meet her cerebrally.
This is it.
Fibers of a woman in the making
as I take my palms
and dig as if there is a story to find,
into a greased scalp of hair that flakes though
it doesn’t fail to mold
with sweaty oil making a waxed frame.
I push it and it stays,
holds at a frozen incline
like a breath without a second half.
I’m damn pissed.
You cut the encore! when there isn’t one to begin with.
I pinch an unsatiated gasp
like tying an inhale too tight with string.
Hollow lungs and
cool
like snippets of mint
or a dusty tabloid
lamenting a moment in time
but missing.
I step in the shallow backwards.
There’s a reason why they call these flyaways.
I push my torso over the sink and crowd
my face into the vanity mirror,
big-eyed and looking up
at the stubby rays of a sun.
I was Icarus except I was told to be closer.
I was Icarus who was born my women.
What are they reaching for, 妈妈?
To see the rest of you, I guess. To see the world.
It’s like they’re dancing.
I don’t think they’ve learned the rules.
I thought the laughter was supposed to be light
but nothing melted but the music.
The scene switches.
The girl is dressed in weighted clothes
that feel of a bodybag not yet employed.
Thumbs the frayed bristles of her toothbrush,
thinking, and, as she brushes the grooves of her molars,
blood runs.
A nameless tension settles on her back and hips,
pulsing like a sore dance.