Life of the Party: Poems

Girlafter Ada Limón i don’t think i’ll ever not be oneeven when the dozen grays sproutingfrom my temple take hold and spreadlike a sterling fungus across my scalp,even when the skin on my hands is looseas a duvet, draped across my knuckles,even when i know everything there is to knowabout heartbreak or envy or the mortalityof my parents, i think, even then i’ll wantto be called girl, no matter the mouthit comes from or how they mean it,girl, the curling smoke after a sparklerspatters into dark, girl, sweet spoon of crystal sugarat the bottom of my coffee, girl, whole mouthof whipped cream at the birthday party, say girl,i think, i’ll never die, i’ll never stop runningthrough sprinklers or climbing out of open windowsi’ll never pass up a jar of free dum dumsi’ll never stop ripping out the hangnail with my teethi’m a good girl, bad girl, dream girl, sad girlgirl next door sunbathing in the drivewayi wanna be them all once, i wanna beall the girls i’ve ever loved,mean girls, shy girls, loud girls, my girls,all of us angry on our porches,rolled tobacco resting on our bottom lipsour bodies are the only things we own,leave our kids with nothing when we diewe’ll still be girls then, too, we’ll still be pretty,still be loved, still be soft to the touchpink lip and powdered nose in the casketa dozen sobbing men in stiff suitsyes, even then, we are girlsespecially then, we are girlssilent and dead and stillthe life of the party. If a Girl Screams in the Middle of the Night and no one is there to hear ithere’s what happens. i’ll tell you.if she is in the woods, it shootsfrom the cannon of her throat& smacks itself against a branch,whips around it like a tetherball.if she is facedown in the moss,it seeps into the forest floor’s pores,& every time a hiker passes through,the days beyond her unravel,& steps along the sponge-green floor,a small howl will fan out from beneath his feet.if the girl is in the city,the scream gets lodgedin the cubby of a neighbor’s ear,prevents him from sleeping at night& so, naturally, he sells it to a secondhand store.he takes it to the buying counterin a jewelry box & says,i don’t know who this belonged tobut i don’t want it anymore.& though the pierced & dyed employeeis reluctant to take it, she sees the purplebags like rotting figs under the neighbor’s eyesso she offers store credit.& so as not to startle customers,a small label will be placed on the boxthat says a scream & each time a person cracksit open the girl’s rattling tongue will shake looseinto the store. this happens for months but no onewants to buy it, to take care of it. everyone wantsto hear it once to feel something & then go backto their quiet homes, so the store throws itin a dumpster out back, where the garbagetruck picks it up & smashes it beneathits hydraulic fists. the scream will get buriedin a landfill somewhere in new jersey& later the landfill will be coated in grass,where a wandering child will see a hill,will throw her body against it& shriek the whole way down.  Ghost Story for Masturbating at Sleepovers after Melissa Lozada-Oliva  have you heard the one about the girlsin sleeping bags littered across the living room floor,faces next to each other’s feet, bellies full on pantry foodand quiet, eyes vigilant to a black cube television? in my version it goes like: one girl slithers out into the darkand whispers the song of herself.soon, they are all on their stomachs,pushing up against long johnswith the mounds of their palms,and no one names what is happening, both becauseit will become real and because there is not a namefor it yet, only the knowledgethat whatever it is must not be said aloud. in another version, a mother is falling into a still sleep,certain that her daughter has not yet discoveredthat what swells is not always a wound. she wakes,hours later, to an orchestra of breath in the next roomand makes her way down the hall, hovers in the doorway,and sees a dozen girls in white, quivering against the carpet. for a moment, a small chaos blooms in her sternum,cheeks erupt with blood, the dance of denialin her stomach, and then she remembers her ownsmall ghosts–the curl of her best friend’s toes in a roomlike this one, breath echoing from her pillowback into her mouth again and again, like this,until she grew tired and resolved herself into the floor. No Baptism Once, everything was a gift. Once, anythingresembling the thing we wanted was the thingwe wanted. We were not yet gangly and scowlingat the generic cereal in the cabinetor knock-off Adidas slides with four stripes. When we begged for a swimming pool and my fatherfilled trash cans with hose water, we sawwhat was made for our bodies and no one else’s;when he built a playhouse from splinteredplywood, with a metal slide, we saw a giantsilver tongue spilling into the dirt. When the sun lifted itself to its highest point,a proud bully, and the city became a third-degreeburn, we ignored the desert curfew and insteadheard the slide singing, One more ride,imagined ourselves floating without burnsto the ground. So I stood at the top, nakedunder my dress, and let my legs unfold in frontof me, lace parachute ballooning from my hips,bare butt to the metal, blisters hatchinglike small eggs, rising, pink yolks, I heard the drought laughingwith its smoker’s throat:There’s no water for you here.the pain I don’t sayout loud, builds a homeinside me. First Grade, 1998Dylan got busted for bringing a bullet to school & when he slipped the casing out of his pocket like a rare pill we were all certain that the hollow point would explode at any second, our bodies tense and heavy like a dozen dying suns, we imagined his hand blown to confetti but I knew he came from a family that shot big game, I knew they had a meat freezer & glass-eyed deer on every wall, so it wasn’t his fault he didn’t see bullets the way the rest of us did, something he could toss up and catch in his palm with ease & it was the same year my lips were so chapped that the red crack ran up beneath my nose & I couldn’t stop licking the wound & when I left class to hold my burning mouth against the water fountain, Frankie was passed out & bleeding from his forehead on the hallway floor & Ms. Rosemary said I might have saved his life, whether that’s true, I don’t know, what I do know is that Frankie was a redheaded soundless child & after that he wouldn’t stop talking about almost dying but never gave me credit for discovering his body & the next week Jeremy launched himself off a swing set & his forearm bone shot through his bent wrist, I saw it, anyway, I heard the word fractured in a spelling bee so when I ran to tell Ms. Amy, I was set on flaunting my new vocabulary but the hard corners jutted into my cheeks & my memory went soft & so I just stood there stuttering about the skeleton & finally, when Ms. Amy found Jeremy in the grass, the word wriggled its way into my mouth & I shouted, It’s fractured! & Ms. Amy whipped & snapped, It’s so much more than that, but I was just happy to have spoken my new language & then there was the family of baby pink mice in the reading corner & Carl, my favorite custodian, had to remove them, but rumor has it that he gathered them in a sock & smashed them under a rock in the parking lot & I couldn’t look at him the same after that, based on my understanding he was a murderer of tiny things & we were tiny things, I remember, even then, understanding the smallness of myself, of all of us & the way we had to dodge & skip through the world like rodents under the boots of men, except for once, when Miguel went on vacation to Mexico & was killed in a collapsed cave & we planted him a tree but it was just a seedling, no taller than my right knee & when we all stood in a circle to wish him goodbye, I remember looking at the struggling plant, its wiry arms & frail trunk & feeling, for the first time, big.[my favorite pastime is watching the babysitter put her hair into a ponytail. she smooths it flat against her scalp & even when i think it must be perfect she smooths it again, gathers the overflow in her fist and removes a black elastic from her wrist, stretches and slaps till there’s no slack, splits the tail in two & yanks the arms apart, forehead skin strained taut against her skull, eyebrows pulled to an arch like a doll drawn happy.]