Girl

translates into

please be kind to me, but it suggests:

everything she was or wasn’t

a silky camisole, a nice pair of heels

a woman gathered into her dark conservative dress

destined to juxtapose

her bones made of sugar

metropolitan chic all tight pants and white scarves

a perpetual seventeen-year-old leaning against the wall

a handful of tinfoil stars

will marry a beautiful boy and have beautiful clones pushed from beneath her ribs

and her nails brilliant in shellac, in chroma

pour into the bell of her trumpet

hum low bass notes and coil their ropes

he falls asleep before her, she starts kicking him. It’s transference.

that rag doll girl in her hand-me-down gingham frayed at the hem

she was splintered wood and sea water

in the mirror, it means:

she wears the world well.

Poetry from Rachel Contreni Flynn, Warsan Shire, Tori Aitken, Suzanne Fisher, Jennifer Givhan, Julie Marie Wade, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Cheryl Dumesnil, Roxane Gay, EJ Koh, Rebecca Beauchamp