MIRROR
Sometimes, she told me, liking someone is just a way to pass the time. Each illicit word a loose tooth slipping from the open mouth of our class flirt— the kindest name fourteen-year-olds pinned to a girl infamous through every grade for tucking teachers' names under her tongue as if forbidden candy in place of hunger. See, we hadn’t understood yet where the empty comes from even though we had been told girls were always wanting to be filled. How, across the vast foyer that held only waiting, sunlight launched silver curveballs off the sleek roof of every car rounding the smooth driveway & yet never quite caught our shadows. Her arm, bright with sweat, near enough to radiate dangerous heat. I thought she meant pretending the way every bright carriage becomes a cool hand in an afternoon buzzing with searching bodies so I breathed I understand into the space separating any two mouths. But I didn’t know, then, how waiting turns the waking hours into one long stretch for tomorrow until the makeshift relief of fiction turns into the tenuous thing itself. Once, beyond outflung classroom doors, I saw her touching herself under battered desks with a blacksmith’s hands. The shape of loneliness splintering a body into pathways out of fear. The precarious attempt to know wholeness not as sensation but indescribable matter. Her fingers moving fast & brutal as if mapping blue edges of the unseen sky. This is what it means to really want something. Her open mouth an iris ringed with desperation deeper than shame. You’ll forsake everything if only to be real—
Natalie Wee is the author of Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines (Words Dance Publishing, 2016) and Once in a Blue Moon (BookThug, 2018). She has been published or has work forthcoming in numerous publications, including The Adroit Journal, Drunken Boat, Room Magazine, & more. She has been nominated for the 2016 Best of the Net Anthology and a Pushcart Prize. Find her first book at http://natalieweepoetry.com/.
