we might decide to disembark, depending on how likely
it was that the boys, our only incentive, had flocked to
the usual spot beneath the overpass.
And then there was the small twitch in my belly
when we saw the circle of shaggy heads
in the distance, a pile of bikes and skateboards
next to them like a metal bonfire, or the cloud of sweet
grape smoke that met us before
they noticed we had arrived.
It often seemed at first like they didn’t want us
there—an observation I had never voiced to Jordan
for fear it would make it real—but she was always
good at bartering for her presence; as soon as she spoke
you would forget what it was like to live without her.
Before the boys could decide to do something
that didn’t include us, Jordan would make light of exactly
what it was we had that they didn’t, usually in the form
of a complaint like, “I just want to take off my bra already,
can you help me?” And because I was With Her,
a title I would have preferred over my own name,
they would assume me next in line to be stripped,
as though whatever pain Jordan felt, I felt.
It wasn’t long before we were in the center
of the circle playing with each other’s hair
while they watched, flaunting the way we could share
our bodies where they weren’t allowed. It was a gift—
to know a boy’s desire and catch it in a jar,
to watch it bash its body against the glass.
If I could freeze the moment here, I would—
head on Jordan’s thigh, emptying a peach
Prime Time into my throat. But of course the
debt billowed towards us with its jaw unhinged
and we were asked to walk how we speak,
to name the city we had built in the boys’ bodies.
Jordan knew I was a nervous girl. Maybe that’s why
she kept me around, I made her look wise,
a broken wristwatch on the forearm of her life.
And I remember when she saw me tremble,
held my cheek, smiled weakly, said,
I’ve got this, as though she knew all along
she would have to tame the circus by herself.
I kept lookout while she took the oldest one
behind the bushes and did whatever she did best,
which, from what I understood, was the ability
to take and take and take.
Jordan’s choke becomes a groan becomes
a laugh and I breathe for the first time.
She emerges from the tall grass, water welled
in her bottom lids and smiling, like a teary-eyed mother
at a dance recital. He says something about talent, stamina,
ahead of her time, and she calls him a liar and he grabs her ass
with a newfound sense of purpose
and walks us to the bus stop
with an arm draped over the back of her neck while I float
a few feet away, and when he climbs on his bike to leave,
Jordan yanks him by the shirt and demands two cigarettes.
One for now to get out the taste
and one for later when I remember what I did.
By now, the sky has cracked into a shrill blue—
a final shriek before the sun plummets behind the volcanoes.
It is July, just past evening rush hour
and the city is a dying flame,
the gap of silence between hissing cars
growing longer and longer
and longer with each tender minute.
I MUST HAVE ONLY LOVED HER IN THE SUMMER
Because what I remember are her legs,
bare and speckled red from the heat,
the sour of her armpits while she talked
with her hands, or how she slept on a towel
in the gravel backyard, sun glaring
off the oil on her shoulders, or how she flipped
through her mother’s catalogues, drawing genitals
stuffed into a model’s mouth, or how we only wore
spaghetti straps, even at night, her finger swirling
the perimeter of a blood moon while we lay on the roof
of a car parked on the mesa, a dozen girls’
bones buried beneath
our slow-breathing bodies, years before they were discovered,
or how we took naked ice baths and swapped
sucks on a rocket pop
that we bought with loose change and how, by any definition
of what it means to be in love, we were that, but somehow
only in June, or July, or August, come September
she was gone, hibernating, waiting for the sun, her skin,
her tongue lapping up the salt on my cheek,
we only ever talked about our bodies and what we wanted
to teach them, if we couldn’t tangle our legs together
we had nothing to talk about, if we couldn’t dangle ourselves
in front of each other, what was the point of hanging out,
if we couldn’t suck a bloody bruise into each other’s necks
to make some boy jealous, who were we really?
What else was there to do?
BACKPEDAL
the boys and i are playing quarters with double shots of vodka and i am winning. by winning i mean i am not one of the boys but i am the next best thing. by the next best thing i mean i am a girl and i am drunk. every time i miss a shot, johnny gets to flick a quarter against my knuckles and now my knuckles are bleeding onto my thighs but every time i make a shot i get to knock back a throat-full of liquor. i slam down the glass until it cracks up the side and now the game is about who will still drink from it, who will risk shards in the belly, who will cut up their insides for a pack of newports, and it’s not that i even want the cigarettes, it’s just that i am not afraid of blood, which is also part of being a girl. but being the only girl means making yourself lose when you’ve won too much so i bounce the coin off the rim of the shot glass and let johnny slice me open. in thirty minutes, johnny is dragging me out of the bathroom by my wrists and i can hear him saying something about blood on the carpet, about a drunk girl in the house who is staining everything and i think that means i must be the champion of quarters. johnny is the kind of guy who sleeps with a gun, not women. but johnny is always the one inviting me over for a game of quarters and sometimes i wonder if this is how johnny fucks. like maybe he is the kind of man who only screams when he is underwater or lets me feel how strong his fingers are without actually touching me. maybe that’s why we’re all here, even the boys, to let johnny hold us like a barred window. i work a double one day a week and on this day, don’t answer johnny’s call. by one day a week i mean two men break in and shoot johnny in the temple for two thousand pills and i am scraping pasta from a businessman’s plate into the trash. at some point i’ll tell you why i didn’t go to the wake. i guess i never really knew johnny like that. by that i mean sober or in a church. when i say i didn’t go to the wake i mean i drove by his house every day for two years and the FOR SALE sign never got taken down, like the house would always be johnny’s, like maybe the whole town knew what happened there. like maybe no one could get rid of the blood.
THE AUTOCROSS
The men at the autocross say I could be useful
in a garage because I have tiny hands. I can reach<
br />
the deepest corners of an engine like a housemaid,
make it all brand new.
They say I’m different from other girls,
the ones splayed out across the hood
like a brand-new paint job. The ones who like the taste
of old oil under a fingernail, how easy it is
to zip off a navy jumpsuit.
The men at the autocross don’t believe I know
the difference between a four-cylinder and a V6 engine
but they keep me around anyway because
I don’t take up much space. They aren’t bad guys.
They don’t know my name, never asked,
just call me Girl Driver, which is what I am.
The men aren’t wrong.
When I clock in a tenth of a second faster than Mike
in the ’99 Miata, the men say it’s because I don’t weigh shit.
They don’t know my name but they call me Cheater.
The men retighten my bolts just for safe measure.
The men open my car door, Ladies first.
The men are always helping.
One man asks how I reach the pedals.
One man asks where my daddy is.
One man opens his trunk and says,
Bet you’re small enough to fit.
[the babysitter’s best friend was her dog, who she trained to jump like a show pony over stacked boxes in the street. once, i saw her father on the front porch, tending to a bite wound on his calf. for weeks he swore that if her mother didn’t agree to euthanize it, he would shoot it in the mouth himself.]
MURDER OF A LITTLE BEAUTY
with lines from People magazine’s 1997 coverage
of the JonBenét Ramsey murder
Little Miss Christmas dead in the basement
ripples of shock quickly spread through the nation
rope & a blanket found near the victim
the blood & flesh of Miss West Virginia
the perfect mother, the perfect brother
a private jet for the perfect father
duct tape, a cord twisted round her neck
a prime-time interview on CNN
flirtatious, provocative, six-year-old kid
America’s Royale Miss in 1996
elegant, lavish, gets all the attention
a ransom note as much as John’s pension
dab your eye, we know you like it gory
only the blondes get a cover story
girls go missing right around the corner
but she needs a tiara for us to mourn her
naturally attractive, exceptionally bright
how many ways can we say the word white?
[i knew her father as well as a child knows a man not of her blood. i knew he stayed up late to draw blueprints of houses we would never see. let us run our fingers along their perfect lines. once, i told him a joke about blondes getting hit by trains, & he laughed so hard he fell off a playground swing into the dirt.]
WE ALL GOT BURNT THAT SUMMER
The music died that night in Albuquerque.
—ATMOSPHERE, That Night
A boy has just pressed
his mouth against me,
in a fast-food restaurant bathroom.
I think he would love me
if he let himself, if he could get past
our age difference, I say.
I am talking about my favorite musician,
a rapper twice my age, with acne scars
and black hair, a weathered face I want to know.
He tells me the last time Atmosphere
came here was a year before,
when I was still a child,
when I was young enough to believe
every year was urgent and couldn’t imagine
being alive when my ID expired.
The boy tells me he was there at the concert,
his breath smells like the small fist
I had unfurled into his throat.
I like that my body is his breath now,
that I know who I am while he talks.
He’ll never come back, the boy says,
because a girl was murdered the night
of the show by a custodian and went
undiscovered behind a vending machine
for four days. Everything is tragic.
Everything has either already happened
or never will.
The boy keeps saying it could have been me,
as if that concert, that night, was my only shot
at dead-girl stardom and now that I’ve just barely
missed the grip of some quiet janitor,
I’ve got a long life ahead, no hogtied future
waiting for me at the end of an alley.
But the truth is I don’t feel relief.
I don’t feel safe.
I am mad at her for dying.
I want him to come back,
I want him to find me.
I want to know
what it means to survive
something.
does it just mean
I get to keep my body?
THE SANDIAS, 2008
the only person who knows,
and i mean really knows—
from even eight states away,
a pitch so gentle only
he can hear it—my sadness,
is my father who, when i was sixteen
and experiencing my first heartbreak,
knew nothing but also
knew everything at once,
and without asking any questions,
took me on the back of his
motorcycle and drove us
up to the mountains where,
in the middle of summer,
we rode the ski lift
up and down, admiring, silently,
the tall grass and blond poppies
and untouched globes of dandelion
florets and the lonely boy
at his summer job who pulled
the lever just for us, the only
customers, to lift our bodies
up this silent beast, and i
was too young to point
and say, how beautiful,
still stuck in my teen religion
of black eyeliner, eyes rolling,
but knew, despite my denial,
that something here was
worthy of praise and i guess
that was the lesson,
my father, who knows,
and i mean really knows,
my sadness, knew that i
didn’t need to be told,
i needed to see, that despite
it all, there was still
something alive beneath me.
STAYING SMALL
what i am trying to say is actually very simple:
my first love is dead & nothing about my life
has changed. but of course, everything is different.
of course, there is the pang of grief when i notice him,
still alive, in my older poems—once, i named him
the small boy, another time the boy who loved me—
& of course, there is the fact that the fear of running
into him in a shopping mall or post office
is now entirely fantastical, a dream, a relief,
the mundane becoming impossible. & of course,
i used to laugh every time “let’s get it on” by marvin gaye
&n
bsp; was playing & i would lean over to the person next to me,
no matter who it was, & i would say
i lost my virginity to this song, can you believe that?
& for a moment the person & i would sing along
together, swim in the high notes, & then i would tell
them the story about the day andrew & i
decided to have sex & how we were children,
but we were both children, which made it okay,
& we planned every detail, down to what we wore
that day. i will tell the listener i wore a skirt
because i saw it in the movies & didn’t want him
to see me naked & again, what children we were,
uncovering the wet myth of sex & sometimes,
depending on who the listener is, they will stiffen
at the thought of kids & sex & i will assure them over
& over that we loved each other, we did, i will say,
i used up a whole disposable camera taking photos
of him & when i got them developed at the pharmacy,
i also bought a single frame & chose the picture i loved
most & propped it up next to my bed, i will say.
isn’t that the most teenager thing? & the listener will relax,
comfortable now with this familiar love that they too lived
once & of course, since he died, i have not heard the song,
which means i haven’t had the chance to revise
this conversation i have grown to know so well,
i imagine, perhaps, it will be exactly the same
except for the very end, when the listener begins to sink
into their chair with ease & before they reimburse me with
the story of their first love, i will say, he’s dead now,
& something, i don’t know what, will change,
the new knowledge that this small boy, this boy
who loved me, this boy who, in a small way
they love now too, is not alive somewhere.
he does not reminisce. & they will apologize
& i will tell them it’s okay. and it is. i did not lose
someone i love. i lost someone i once loved.
i did not have to sell his furniture or start grocery shopping
Life of the Party Page 3
