Friday, May 12, 2017

The poem I wish I could have read as a teenage girl

My newest poem, which I'll maybe be reading as a warm-up before I read my Choose Your Own Adventure erotic flash memoir at the FBomb on Tuesday night. I hope you enjoy it, and also that I can read it to you, live, then and there. It's the poem I wish I could have read when I was a teenage girl.


An Open Letter to the Young Woman Who Hate-Watched Me Dance All Crazy Near Her and Her Boyfriend at the Show

1. Tommy, On The Bus

In 5th grade, I rode the bus.
Tommy Turley rode the bus, too.

God, but yes, his name really was Tommy Turley.

He used to pull out his pecker, as he called it,
And lay it there, on the denim bed of his
scrawny-legged lap. My mom called it
a Tallywhacker. Not Tommy’s, specifically,
as she’d never seen his, far as I knew.

But I’d seen it plenty.
Tommy-on-the-bus would pull out his pecker
And then talk all casual-like
Like his penis was just a set piece on the stage of “school bus,”
like a bookbag or lunch box

I tried to give it meaning, his dick
I wanted it to be symbolic of something,
Even at that young of an age
The teacher of literature was emerging

Once, full-frontal frankenfurter display,
Tommy decided to give me some advice.
Now, this was a welcome change from the otherwise
Consistent and classy requests to lick my bellybutton
From the inside. “Now, really, Christy.
Y’ur not that ugly. But you should wear your hair down.
It pinches your face when you wear it up like that.”

Now this was helpful, bc now I knew
His penis was an example of his whole
Philosophy! He wanted me to let my hair down
To live the good life! The let-it-all-hang-out life!
The who-cares-who-sees-what life.

Thank you, Tommy. For your concern. And your wisdom.
It took me a long time to stop scratching my face
In the mirror. And to stop crying
Into the channels that I carved there.

2. Home, in My Body

I came a long way to get here

From the empty house of Childhood, and
The Hall of Horrors that was high school
Had sock hops, sure, but I didn’t find myself there.
I just remember hoping the cute boys would.
The small room of my Youth was stuffed with Mother’s fears
For me. And boxes of aggressively rhymed poetry
About Him. The He who would rescue the Me
Who wasn’t there.

Who was nowhere, because all I’d ever been taught was how to be absent,
From all the absentees around me, amputees of the spirit,
Filled with pills and television and regret
Ghosts in their shells looking for the thing that hadn’t happened yet
The thing that was always never coming or already gone.

I spent so much time fearing I’d never be inhabited
That I forgot to live here myself

I came a long way to get here. Into this body.
So now I walk around like I own the place
Because I do.

I am what happens
When the girl escapes
From the siege of boy soldiers
With their ammunition spit and boys will be boys
bullshit
with enough of herself intact
To realize it’s harder for them to hit you
When you’re dancing.

3. Me and You (and Him), At the Show

Trying to be cool wastes a lot of energy
That could better be spent dancing

And my style of dancing reveals that I
am only in it for me.
Which isn’t to say I dance badly...
Just maybe weirdly enthusiastically and self-assuredly
For a non-professional.

You are not in it for you. You are very much a cool girl.
Maybe 18.
You are standing there with your boyfriend.

You are both very well-groomed.
You are groomed in ways I am not aware existed even though I am looking at the results of them
All over you and your perfect face.

I see you looking for my cracks.
I see you finding the lines on my face that reassure you
I’m too old for your bf.

This always happens at the all-ages shows.

I see you watching me dance and I see you seeing your bf watching me dance
I see you turn it into too-crazy, too wild, who does she think she is that show off
She thinks she looks cool but she looks like she’s on drugs and electrocuted
You’re right! I am on drugs and electrocuted!

But you’re wrong about one thing...
I’m not too old for your boyfriend.

4. Chalk Outline, in the Mirror

But I am older than you.
I got started early, carving myself into a picture
He, whoever he was, might want to look at
The first cuttings with my own fingernails
In the same mirror mirrors on the wall that you stare into everyday
The ones that tell you there’s a fairest of all
And you ain’t it
Or that you are it
It’s all the same, sister

Oh, I’ve been there
Where my every midnight when I’m alone
is a monologue
on a stage
he isn’t looking at anyway

5. Sister to Sister, on the Balcony

You count your deficiencies like rosary beads
And pray he won’t notice them
That he will notice mine, like you do

I would not have us strung up on a line
Picked apart, weighed for our differences
Like fruit at the market in a man’s hand
Is she ripe? Too ripe to be sweet still? Is she
loose enough or just bruised?
But you make yourself an accomplice. You
hope he strolls by to tell you that you are the East
and you are the Sun,

You love it when he tells you to kill your moon sister,
who is already sick and pale with grief that thou, her maid,
art far more fair than she!

Why do you let him put you on the map like that? Like he can just
Call the cardinal directions and put you in your place?

You are not a point on his compass.
You are a rose of the winds.

I want the dawn spirit
Always rising in the east
But I also want her sister’s
Dusky reclining

Stop playing this zero-sum game
You will need your sisters after he’s gone
Burned out on broken promises
And Romeo’s wordy wooing of whoever’s
in his line of sight
in the sky tonight

He lifts himself up, climbing your hair or your trellis
If he falls, your beauty bears the brunt of it

6. Birds Fly, Over the Rainbow

Look. I know I look crazy throwing all this shine around
Setting the buzzing honey hive of my body on fire, but
I have forgotten how to be absent, how to sway quiet and unthreatening
How to recognize the beat, but not submit to it

I’ve forgotten how to watch myself from outside myself
As if through your or his or their eyes
I climbed out of the looking glass, I stepped out
From under the proscenium arch
That ain’t nothing like a rainbow
But keeps us thinking we’re somebody else’s pot of gold

Spend yourself, sweetie
Make it rain with me
Make it sweat and pulse and flood
Your body was never meant to be anyone else’s
But your own

Tell me all the times a man has pushed you
Right out of your mind or body

Tell me:
What did your Tommy-on-the-bus say or do to you?


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