Ok we are not nothing.
You know the evening sky
like a drunken mother in a nightgown, you know in the morning when she cracks like the axe split
the cherry tree and lies all cold
on the ground,
and the dog inside pawing
at your red toes, your pre-pubescent growth spurts aching
with the dawn.
Something haunting. Like the echo
of the rubber ball rolling
under the bed that your limbs
have outgrown but you can’t
afford much better,
your room is tilted down on this side,
lower sunk into the earth,
punched and swallowed, but cursed
all the same. like a loose tooth.
red dawn on your jam and toast,
and your legs stop swinging,
you reach a hand in, and yank at that hanging chrysalis feeling,
and lick it when it’s free,
and this is why they’ll call you
bucky butterfingers
you just don’t know it yet
Something ugly, and childish, and smeared around your gaping mouth like blood,
we can just
pretend it’s cherry popsicle.
I tried to cut my fingers off with
safety scissors, you left me all alone behind
that fence, those great big sunflowers
with moving heads and stiff necks,
and yellow tongues, I used to run out back with
milky slopping glue in the corners of my eyes
and eat all the carrots and dirt and hedges I wanted, alone,
until a grown up found me,
and peeled me from the garden by scruff of my neck,
she closed the bathroom door behind me, told me to wash my face with blue dish soap,
and I cried when it stung, when it
made my tongue feel like a slug
in salt, but
I said ouch very quiet with
her wrinkly, rubber hands squeezing in under my
play-doh ribs, cartilaginous and
still soft, like
a tadpole in mud.
she turned her nose and
said I smelled like a wet dog and
plopped me covered in scrapes
and full of wriggling worms like
fly ridden fruit, her black skirts bit
away the feeding curl of ants I fed my
stale cookies to, she sat me with a towel to dry in the time out room to
be eaten by fat clowns with
clocks for faces, and half past midnight
for teeth,
I buckled my mouth, I was brave,
crossed arms and wolf fur under
my armpits, wild thing screaming for her mother
the alphabet backwards
smashing doll houses in
velcro Mary Janes, the
sand box bully, the
monkey bar hog with
wood chip splintered knuckles and
callouses to prove it,
covered in scrapes and
caved in and hollowed out
like an empty pint of ice cream,
I have spare band aids in my
pockets, like confetti to a cheap
magician
why are those purple things under your eyes
so big? can’t you do something
about them? don’t you
want to be a better girl?
